I've been having some fun playing around with the ASP.NET AJAX Beta release this weekend. Usually when I integrate AJAX functionality into my code I just end up using the built-in server controls that ASP.NET AJAX provides (UpdatePanel, UpdateProgress, etc) and the cool controls in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Scott Hanselman had jokinglycalled using these AJAX controls "cheating" when he interviewed me two weeks ago for his latest podcast- since they don't require that you write any client-JavaScript for most common scenarios. This weekend I decided to focus my coding on some of the client JavaScript pieces in the ASP.NET AJAX framework that don't use UpdatePanels at all, and to experiment with alternative ways to use the server to easily...(read more)