ASP.NET Ajax Design Patterns : Tech Session, Day 1

One good thing I learned from this – Microsoft has a free version of Visual Studio called Visual Web Developer 2008 that even their own developers use on a regular basis… obviously they’re not making it a high priority to promote it.

This was a basic demo of how to create an ajax driven page using the AJAX.NET controls (partial page update panels). The speaker mentioned several different popular methods of retrieving data using ajax.net – such as paging/caching records and using what he called “predictive fetching” which is basically just saying we should program applications in a way that stores relevant data (cached using javascript) to be shown later based on the actions the user takes in the beginning of their session. He also mentioned pageflakes.com, since it was built using ajax.net.