Remembering the pre-AJAX days ?

Back in the early days of AJAX development, before the name was even cornered around 2004... there were many ways to obtain the AJAX-like effects of todays omnipresent XMLHTTP implementations.

One I found particularly nice was the "Webservice.htc" HTML-component which mimicked todays Webservice-proxies.

One of the guys on my team asked me a question leading me to look it up, and to me great amusement it was still available for download right there on Microsoft's website.

Check it out in case you never had the chance to work with it, and if you have worked with it... pay it a visit and remember the "fun" times we had doing AJAX-like effects before it even had a name.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms531034(VS.85).aspx

AJAX History Management for dotNET

Most AJAX developers have at some point damned the lack of browser support for browser history and bookmarking. A large subset of these developers have eventually attempted to solve the problem by implementing support for browser support, needless to say: with varying degrees of success.

As some of the major cornerstones in this latest frontier on the RIA front it should be noted that Yahoo have shared their current project on the topic with its developer community (Browser History Manager: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/history/) based on the initial initiative by Brad Neuburg (Really Simple History: http://codinginparadise.org/projects/dhtml_history/).

However... browsing the RIA communities I found a general lack of seamless integration to the serverside written in dotNET when the state has to be restored, either from history navigation or bookmarking. I decided to do this based on the AJAX.NET framework (http://ajax.asp.net/) and to extend the functionality of the UpdatePanel to register and restore states.

I have it up and running now on and it works eminently for the IExplorer and Firefox people, sad I am using the IFrame approach I still need to provide the workaround for Safari so that it will be suitable to send into production systems.

When I have completed this task I will post the system here...