Thursday, September 6, 2007 7:15 AM
There's a great MSDN article by Jeff Prosise that talks about the pros and cons of using the Microsoft AJAX update panel compared to other options (like web services and page methods). A quick excerpt:
"For better or for worse, the UpdatePanel control is the darling of the ASP.NET AJAX community. I say "for better" because UpdatePanel makes partial-page rendering shockingly easy and "for worse" because its simplicity and ease-of-use come at the cost of efficiency and, ironically, bandwidth.
While UpdatePanel brings AJAX magic to ordinary Web pages, it doesn’t bring the efficiency we normally associate with AJAX. Did you know, for example, that when an UpdatePanel control performs an asynchronous AJAX callback to the server to update its content, the request contains everything a conventional ASP.NET postback contains, including view state? Most developers assume that AJAX eliminates view state. That’s not the case, though, with UpdatePanel’s brand of AJAX."
D