What did you think of this article? Do you use remote scripting or write custom code for automating client background requests in your Web pages using XMLHTTP now? If not, why not? Do you think Microsoft's alterations to ASP.NET will increase the number of clients making such calls? Is that a good thing? Do you think this new capability will alter the way you program Web applications, or does it simply a thin wrapper around techniques you're already using? Let us know in the Web Development discussion forum.
In Whidbey, there's a better way to call remote server methods without using postbacks or remote scripting—letting you update information in the browser without redrawing the entire page. Find out how to fetch data from the server using a client call.
by Vishnu Prasad H
February 25, 2004
here are plenty of good reasons to anticipate Whidbey, among which are a number of enhancements for client script support, including new attributes and a ClientScriptManager class to handle client scripts. However, perhaps the most welcome client-script enhancement feature is Whidbey's support for remote server callbacks using client script.
Refreshing or posting a page to do a data lookup is an extremely common technique. In classic ASP, developers used script to handle submitted data, which often made ASP code very difficult to maintain. Like most multi-page Web applications, posting form data to the server caused a complete request-response cycle, where the server would respond to the post with an entirely new page. The browser, naturally, would then render the new page in place of the existing page. This constant page-redrawing tends to make the user experience awkward and slow. One way that developers alleviated such interface problems was by using remote scripting, which used Java applets to make server calls in combination with DHTML's dynamic rendering to display updated or new data on an existing page. Alternatively, for pure-IE applications, developers could use client-side script with the XMLHttpRequest object to make background data requests. But both methods required non-trivial efforts, and debugging, in particular, was difficult.
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here are plenty of good reasons to anticipate Whidbey, among which are a number of enhancements for client script support, including new attributes and a ClientScriptManager class to handle client scripts. However, perhaps the most welcome client-script enhancement feature is Whidbey's support for remote server callbacks using client script.
