AJAX and ATLAS and the future of Script callbacks
Peter has some excellent comments (he articulates what I feel exactly) about Betrands post about server callbacks and Ajax. A few weeks ago here at work we had a long “discussion” about Ajax and how it didn’t seem to fit very well with the current ASP.NET eventing model (or page lifecycle). We all seemed to agree that we liked the concept but it just didn’t provide us with an intuitive model to handle the interaction between front end and the code-behind (also seemed like maintenance would be a huge problem). I think it’s summed up well when Bertrand says, “we want simple events on simple controls”. It’s encouraging to hear that MS is going to bring a model to the table in the ATLAS framework that is more in-line with the current page lifecycle but still provide us with some of the goodness that Ajax has.
I have created a Custom Control using Ajax, and once the control was created, the actual implementation on the page was amazingly easy and cool. Encapsulating the Ajax stuff inside a Custom Control makes it much more reasonable.