I have to confess that I cheated before writing this post by researching “Ajax” with my good friend Wikipedia. It’s been quite a while since I’ve read the Iliad cover to cover (ahem), but I uncovered some interesting snippets about the life of Ajax the Great:

• he is described as of great stature and colossal frame
• he commands his army wielding a great axe
• he carries a huge shield made of seven ox-hides with a layer of bronze
• he is not wounded in any of the battles described in the Iliad
• he embodies the virtues of hard work and perseverance
• he left a gigantic skeleton, its kneecap 5 inches in diameter

How much do you think Ajax’s shield or kneecap would fetch on eBay today? At any rate, given the heroic stature of this legendary Greek warrior, I thought it might be tough to work up genuine enthusiasm for more mundane matters like ASP.NET AJAX. However, its popularity is legendary and I’ve seen far to many stunning Ajax-enabled web applications and cool mash-up demos to ignore this humble technology any longer. It’s true that “Asynchronous JavaScript and XML” doesn’t quite strike fear into Trojan hearts, but it is a really powerful way to create rich and responsive web applications that process many requests within the browser. I won’t miss those long round trips to the server, endless screen refreshes, or looping animated gifs while your web application waits for a response from some distant server…

The really good news that I wanted to share is that InnerWorkings released our first Drill on Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX Extensions today! We cover some very important AJAX controls such as UpdatePanel, ScriptManager, Timer, and
ScriptManagerProxy. High level learning objectives for the Drill are as follows - don’t forget that we ask you to learn ASP.NET AJAX by writing code and solving real problems in our sample web applications:

• Convert an existing ASP.NET web page to one with AJAX functionality
• Define regions of a web page whose contents are updated using background
  AJAX-style requests
• Enable partial page rendering in a Master/Content page scenario
• Refresh a region on an AJAX-enabled ASP.NET page at regular intervals, without
  the flicker normally associated with a postback
• Send AJAX requests to a web service and receive data back from that service
  to be interpreted on the client

Check out our Online Catalog for details on this latest release - of course, you will need to have the Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Beta 2
installed to get started. The Drill on ASP.NET AJAX Extensions is our featured “Pick of the Month”, so you can get your hands on 2 hours of coding challenges, full code samples, online reference material, and our testing framework for only $24.95. That’s cheaper than a hardback copy of the Iliad, but we should all read Homer’s classic over Thanksgiving too…

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