Programming ASP.NET AJAX

Chapter 21. Web Parts

Using Ajax can help you make web applications behave more like desktop applications. And the more web applications become like desktop applications, the more developers tend to design and reuse components to deliver greater functionality to their pages.

ASP.NET AJAX offers several ways to reuse components toward adding functionality to browser-based clients. The control extenders in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit are a prime example. This chapter covers another one, Web Parts, an ASP.NET feature (introduced in ASP.NET 2.0), that benefits from an extra boost thanks to the ASP.NET AJAX Futures release.

Using ASP.NET AJAX with ASP.NET Web Parts

This section will show how you can use ASP.NET AJAX with ASP.NET Web Parts to give users more control over the layout and content of an ASP.NET AJAX page. ASP.NET Web Parts are a set of controls enabling users to add, remove, and change elements on a page at runtime. Web Parts offer the ability to create pages such as the Google personalized home page (http://www.google.com/ig) in ASP.NET.

Web Parts are enabled using client script to support drag-and-drop, expand and collapse, and other similar features. However, a limitation of Web Parts as shipped with ASP.NET 2.0 is that most of their functionality is available only in Internet Explorer. Therefore, ASP.NET Web Parts are mostly used in intranet environments that can rely on working with Internet Explorer.

Of course, Internet Explorer is not the only browser available and ...