Yet Another Ajax Blog

Ajax for .NET A .NET developer faces an uphill battle with Ajax right now. The default ASP.NET controls don’t use Ajax. We can buy Ajax-aware components from many third-party vendors these days, but this means we have a new development cost.

As examples, see: Telerik and Infragistics components. Microsoft is working on their own AJAX initiative (surprise surprise) named Atlas, but that’s still in development. It’s not available to those of us who just got the new Visual Studio 2005 and are hot to start new development with .NET 2.0.

There is a very popular library called AJAX.NET (surprise surprise) developed by a guy in Germany named Michael Schwarz. If you Google for \ "C#" AJAX \ you’ll get a lot of hits that make reference to this.

A group named BorgWorx seems to have taken over development of this project. (I need to better understand that relationship)

So, those of us who need to get moving on this now have some decisions to make:

1) Make or Buy?

That depends on how much we know and how much money we have. If we know nothing about how to make this work then we either need to study up fast or we need to buy someone else’s components. Even if we do understand it, will each developer take it upon themselves to write a bunch of new controls to replace those found in the ASP.NET libraries? I don’t think so. It seems more reasonable to let someone else do the work, if we can afford to pay them for it.

2) Use freeware?

This is an attractive option, especially if it’s open source, and that makes the BorgWorx AJAX.NET component a good candidate. However – just because software is free and/or open source (this is where I’m obligated to use the words "beer" and "liberty") doesn’t mean everyone can use it, especially for commercial use. We need to read the licenses carefully to understand our rights and obligations. Look at the bottom of the BorgWorx page for links to Public Source License, Commercial Use, and Quid Pro Quo.

3) Wait for Atlas?

I don’t think so. Unfortunately by the time Microsoft gets the Atlas rocket off the ground the rest of us will be using something else and they’ll need something awfully compelling to get us to switch.

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