SoftCom Corporate Blog

Hello,

Just a quick update to let customers on our Windows hosting plans know that we now provide support for ASP.NET AJAX.  Formerly known as ATLAS, this is a free framework for building rich, interactive, cross-browser web applications. This Microsoft technology integrates cross-browser client script libraries with the ASP.NET 2.0 framework.

This is mainly a development tool for advanced web designers and developers and will have no effect on our existing customer’s web sites. If you do want to use this technology, please make sure you have .NET 2.0 enabled on your account.

With all our Windows accounts we offer the option of running ASP.NET 1.1 or ASP.NET 2.0. By default your account will run ASP.NET 1.1 but you can update that instantly through your account control panel by going to Site Management > Site Settings > ASP.NET Version.

ASP.NET AJAX makes it possible to take advantage of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) techniques to create ASP.NET pages with rich user interfaces. ASP.NET AJAX allows for the creation of web applications in ASP.NET 2.0 which can update data on a web page without a complete reload of the page.

Check out these examples of what some people are doing with AJAX.

I still don’t know what Web 2.0 is. In a recent speech, Andrew Schroepfer from Tier 1 Research said it is the version after Web 1.0 and before Web 3.0. However, without having to assign some meaningless label to this phase of the web, I know this technology is introducing a whole new class of website development.

John Carthy
V.P. Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.