The future of ASP .NET AJAX: Roadmap

About 2 weeks ago, Bertrand Le Roy let us know they published a roadmap describing some of the proposed futures they are considering for future AJAX / Control Toolkit released.

I read up on it, and it’s quite an interesting read.

One of the most striking features is about client data and UI Templates. At the moment, most people use UpdatePanels to make parts of their page postback-free. However, when using an UpdatePanel typically way too much data is sent back and forth between client and server. Easy to program, sure, but not the most efficient way to design a page and keep the load as low as possible. With the client-side data & template-idea, we get an easy way to consume data (eg, from a service) and bind it to a dataview (grid/repeater/listview I suppose), fully AJAX-ified, without using an UpdatePanel. Net effect: we only ask for the data we want from the service, providing much less overhead.

Some other interesting comments by Dave Ward can be found here.

So, if you’re interested in where ASP .NET AJAX is going, and you want to give the team your input, here’s your chance!