The solution to building applications with fast, user-friendly, and responsive user interfaces is here. Yes! Ajax is in. Ajax is an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML—a technology that can reduce web page postbacks significantly and yield better response times for your web applications. Using Ajax, the hits to the web server are reduced—thus, you have fewer page refreshes. Moreover, you can use Ajax to ensure that a specific portion of the page is refreshed and not the entire page content. Usage of Ajax provides rich user experience with a responsive user interface, which eventually results in an awesome user experience. The ASP.NET 2.0 Server development platform is now integrated with the client-side libraries that incorporate cross-browser JavaScript and DHTML technologies. ASP.NET Ajax was available as a separate package in ASP.NET 2.0. With ASP.NET 3.5, you have the Ajax framework built in. In other words, you need not download and install the Ajax package separately in your system; you have built-in support for all Ajax features. There have been a lot of improvements to Ajax in ASP.NET 3.5. We discuss these improvements later in this book. In this hour, we take a look at ASP.NET Ajax, its ingredients, and how we can get started with it.