Well it's been a long while since I've blogged and I'm finally getting around to it. There's been a lot of things going on lately! First and foremost I'm going to be a new Dad starting next year around February or March. I'm excited about the news and can't wait to find out if it's a boy or girl. Things will definitely start changing around the house!

Secondly, I started a new job! I'm really excited about working at this new place because they're doing some really cool AJAX stuff. It's a great opportunity for me because I'll get to work with some really bright people and work with the latest technologies too. I recently picked up a book titled: "Professional ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX" by Matt Gibbs and Dan Wahlin (Amazon) to get some further insight on the ASP.NET AJAX Framework. It's an excellent book and there's plenty of tips and knowledge in here even if you're experienced. For example, I finally found out what the benefit of using the ASP.NET AJAX registration methods (for namespaces, classes, etc...). It has to do with performance, amongst other things. I'll blog more about this later! On another note I introduced SubSonic to the team as well. I had some positive feedback and it looks like we could be implementing it across various projects in the future.

I've recently been working with the ASP.NET AJAX Serialization classes, in particular the JSON serializer. There didn't seem to be too many resources while Googling for examples so I poked around and created a few helper functions for myself such as serializing a DataTable or DataReader into a JSON array / object (Yes ASP.NET Futures supports this already). I'll blog about this in the future as well. Anyways, upon creating some helper functions I realized I had something interesting started. I began thinking about how I could bind my array of JSON objects to a pre-defined template, like a Repeater only on the client-side. It seems possible but I haven't researched this thoroughly to see what implications it could have. It may be a side project in the future.

Feedback:
What I'm interested in knowing is how other people have been using ASP.NET AJAX. Are you taking adavntage of Web Services, or are you using PageMethods? Are you relaying your data as XML or JSON? Why? How are you using the data passed to the client. For example are you using it to update one or two specific elements or are you bulking your objects together to complete multiple tasks?

I'm very interested in hearing your responses.