Today's websites commonly exchange information between the browser and the web server using Ajax techniques. In a nutshell, the browser executes JavaScript code typically in response to the page loading or some user action. This JavaScript makes an asynchronous HTTP request to the server. The server processes this request and, perhaps, returns data that the browser can then seamlessly integrate into the web page. Typically, the information exchanged between the browser and server is serialized into JSON, an open, text-based serialization format that is both human-readable and platform independent.

Adding such targeted, lightweight Ajax capabilities to your ASP.NET website requires two steps: first, you must create some mechanism on the server that accepts requests from client-side script and returns a JSON payload in response; second, you need to write JavaScript in your ASP.NET page to make an HTTP request to this service you created and to work with the returned results. This article series examines a variety of techniques for implementing such scenarios. In Part 1 we used an ASP.NET page and the JavaScriptSerializer class to create a server-side service. This service was called from the browser using the free, open-source jQuery JavaScript library.

This article continues our examination of techniques for implementing lightweight Ajax scenarios in an ASP.NET website. Specifically, it examines how to create ASP.NET Ajax Web Services on the server-side and how to use both the ASP.NET Ajax Library and jQuery to consume them from the client-side. Read on to learn more!
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