Busy Days... Some AJAX.NET tips...
It's always time pressures... when it comes to solution implementations...
The most interesting part of doing a project is the process of architecting a solution - which I felt.
A good architecture secures the base of a system and provides its stabilities and extensiblities. when it's done, developers can have an overview of what the system will look like, also, the guildance to interact with the system, technically. A better business system solution should be self-contained to perform business rules defined by a corporation and followed by employees who interact with the system, regardless of where the data is actually located (some database, files, webservice, etc) or which user interfaces (client program, web UI, handheld devices, etc) is actually adapted and used by system users. therefore, interfaces between data to business solution and between user interface to business solution became another interesting parts to me.
Another formal Query Language regardless of where the data retains should be one of the key to free developers from those dummy sql query codes. you can see each Object-Relation Mapping project all had it's own query syntax similar to or different from ANSI-SQL. I choosed to use NHibernate project as my O/R Mapper because of its SQL-like HQL query, and its interoperabilities of mapping definition files between .NET and Java world. I should go for LINQ project once I started doing project on .NET framework 2.0.
As for the UI interaction part, sometimes it could be really good to minimize post-backs in ASP.NET web UI. We do need various ways to deal with value preservation and transition between post-backs and sometimes not able to only count on ViewStates. AJAX could be one of another solutions to this.
I am currently using AJAX.NET in my projects to deal with minimizing post-backs and better user-experiences. AJAX.NET is an open-source project created by Michael Schwarz which acts as a broker for developers to write simple AJAX code. there is Professional version called AJAX PRO which is also open-sourced and enhanced functionalities such as encryption of interaction traffics and abilities to exchange custom enum types between server side and client side.
There was detail examples provided at AJAX.NET site, but most of the examples might not be able to use based on Ajax.Net Professional broker. the output client side javascript code provided by both http handlers were different. I was searching for that HtmlControlUpdate client function over the internet and found rare info about it. actually this function was provided at Ajax.Net generated common.ashx file, which was not contained in AjaxPro project. thus if one wants to send client html control back to server, modify a little bit at server side and then send it back to client to display, one should try other ways to send back the layout to client in AjaxPro, or, just get the client script from Ajax.Net common.ashx content and save as another include .js file to use in AjaxPro.
the HtmlControlUpdate function was really useful to send client control to server, fill in data at server and send back for layout in a span or div container. Although the example only send one parameter to server, actually multiple parameters are also supported, put the same number of parameters at server function will correctly transited.
It would be good to merge Ajax.Net functions to AjaxPro for it's traffic encryption ability, also webservice support. People who interest in this could download the source from AjaxPro's SVN repository.
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