My weekend reading on ASP.NET Ajax

Over the weekend I read “Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Ajax” by Matt Gibbs and Dan Wahlin – published by Wiley/Wrox. As the official documentation for ASP Ajax was found wanting as an introductory text this looked like just the book for someone looking to “catch up” with Atlas – and so it proved to be.

The authors of this book expect their readers to have a good working knowledge of ASP.NET 2.0 so I was a bit puzzled at first by the inclusion of a tutorial section introducing JavaScript. It did not quite seem to jell with the prerequisite or the word “Professional” in the title. I then realised that this book was targeted at ASP.NET developers working within, largely corporate, environments who, up until now, had been using server side functionality to process forms and pages. My reading of the book rather confirmed that ASP Ajax is also targeted at that same group of developers. This is not “faint praise” on my part – I would be happy to apply this framework extension if it were specified by one of my Customers for an Intranet style project.

There is the rub though. My feeling is that, in an attempt to provide a form of “instant Ajax” that can be applied quickly to pre-existing web based applications, Microsoft have supplied rather too much that is cumbersome and a lot that, for me, misses the point. I like the .NET Framework because it supplies a first class API that allows me to get on with designing and writing software. I tend to avoid the gimmicky bits. As an example I have never bound a DataGrid to directly to an SqlServer table – and I’m never likely to do either. Similarly, I can be pretty sure that I will never feel the need to implement a partial page update – the simplest Ajax style implementation offered by this framework extension. When applying Ajax technology, I want to write my own client side JavaScript code and I want a simple and straightforward way to call server side methods. I do not want a vast attendant baggage of classes and protocols.

If I were undertaking the role of an IT director I might very well appreciate the “standards” that are set by the Microsoft ASP Ajax approach – web based applications should be readily understandable, tweakable and maintainable by anyone who has worked on a similar project. That can count a lot but I find my personal enthusiasm for building applications via config file settings somewhat limited.

If you are building an Internet facing app then you would almost certainly want to design a mini-framework best suited to the particular need rather than take on the overhead of what remains, for Microsoft, a server centric approach to Ajax.

Back on the book. This is a highly readable book covering the ASP Ajax ground thoroughly. It covers all aspects of the ASP Ajax framework – even delving into the depths of deployment over multiple servers. It includes references to freely available tools that can be downloaded to assist in debugging and diagnostics. It encourages the reader to extend his or her knowledge into building client side custom controls supported by JavaScript functionality and Ajax networking to server side resources. This is definitely a “How To” book – only slight criticism being that it is rather light on the “Whats and Whys” – but that would have been a much bigger book and of only marginal interest to the majority of it’s readers.