In the last post, we saw a little bit of ASP.NET AJAX in action. In this post, we’ll introduce a set of controls that use ASP.NET AJAX to help us build interactive pages without having to worry about the details of AJAX.

AJAX is a very important technology in modern web development. It makes our web applications more interactive. It’s not possible to create an attractive Web 2.0 site without using AJAX. ASP.NET comes with its own library to work with AJAX. In this post we’ll see how to use ASP.NET AJAX in our web applications.

We previously installed Visual Studio Express, an IDE to developed .NET applications that Microsoft made available for free. But in order to be able to develop web applications, we need to install another IDE. Don’t worry, it’s also free.