Using Ajax today, and I liked it!!

Today I was working on a small ASP.NET control that allows searching Active Directory from a popup in the browser. My first attempt was of course fully serverside, but two things made this attempt fail. First, for whatever reason a postback did open a new browser window if fired from a popup and secondly, the flashing of the page was particularly annoying. I didn't even bother researching the first problem, the second one made me decide to start working clientside.

 

Stupid me, in my first attempt I thought Ajax would be too complex for this simple task. But then I realized I had to do some form of XML deserialization in Javascript, find a way to distinguish out-of-band calls from regular requests, etc. After a step back, I considered Ajax again and gave this Ajax.NET library a try (found via Chris Sells just today). A little document reading and 30 minutes later the basic stuff worked. I found that the real issue I now have to solve it doing the document dynamics right, not the client/server integration.

 

I just became a little bigger fan of Ajax.