I have been using ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 quite a bit lately, as I’m sure most of you are aware from my recent posts.  In those posts, I used standard HTML script references to show that ASP.NET AJAX is not reliant upon ASP.NET.  I realize that many of you are in fact using ASP.NET, and today we will take a look at using the ScriptManager. 

First we’ll look at using the Preview 4 scripts within an ASP.NET 3.5 application (with the ScriptManager of course) as well as using client templates and ADO.NET Data Services with the ScriptManager in ASP.NET 4.0 (Beta 1).  After that, we’ll take a closer look at some of the new features of the ScriptManager in ASP.NET 4.0. 

Preview 4 and the ASP.NET 3.5 ScriptManager

In my posts on ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 so far, I used standard HTML script references (as stated earlier).  However, what if you wanted to incorporate the new ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 scripts with a ScriptManager.  I tried this in a recent ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 project, and ran into some issues getting it all to work out.  Thanks to this blog (and Bertrand LeRoy), I found the solution.

<asp:scriptmanager id="sm" runat="server">
    <scripts>
        <asp:scriptreference scriptmode="Inherit" name="MicrosoftAjax.js" path="~/scripts/MicrosoftAjax.js" />
        <asp:scriptreference scriptmode="Inherit" path="~/scripts/MicrosoftAjaxAdoNet.js" />
        <asp:scriptreference scriptmode="Inherit" path="~/scripts/MicrosoftAjaxTemplates.js" />                
    </scripts>
</asp:scriptmanager>

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Throughout the course of my introductory posts on ASP.NET AJAX 4.0, we looked at the new DataView control as well as the Sys.Observer class, which brings the Observer pattern to plain JavaScript objects.  The new ASP.NET AJAX release is very exciting offering powerful new features to take AJAX enabled applications to a new level.  In this post, we’ll look at another exciting feature of ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 known as “live bindings.” 

You may remember that we looked briefly at live bindings in the client templates post, but for those examples I used one-way / one-time bindings.  Today, we’ll take a closer look at live bindings and see how two-way live bindings removes the one-way / one-time binding restriction allowing us to update bound elements on our page automatically when the underlying data changes. 

Again, in this post, I’ll be using Preview 4 of the ASP.NET AJAX Library, which can be downloaded from CodePlex.  The Preview 4 version can be used in your applications today (e.g. ASP 3.5, HTML).  Keep in mind that these components are still in "preview" mode (meaning no Microsoft support), though they are usable at your own risk.  For more information, you can check out the license on CodePlex. More...