If you're available Wednesday, June 27th I highly recommend taking the time to attend Scott Guthrie's presentation.  If you've never heard Scott speak before he's extremely knowledgable and fun to listen to so I can guarantee you'll enjoy it.  Here's more information about the event (which is free) as well as a link to the registration site:

Over the past month I've been writing articles for a new column in the .NET Insight and Web Design and Development Insight newsletters published by 1105 Media (a parent company for several media groups) that covers ASP.NET AJAX, XML Web Services/WCF, and Silverlight.  The articles are designed to be very focused so that you learn things quickly without having to scroll through pages and pages of text to learn a single concept.  The first 3 articles have been published and are available at the links below.  Four more articles are on the way.

Matt Gibbs and I recently released a new book for WROX titled Professional ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX that covers all the topics you need to know to build robust ASP.NET AJAX applications.  Matt is a development manager for ASP.NET (and led the ASP.NET AJAX team) and I've had the opportunity to be involved with the product since the early alphas. We put a lot of work into the book so hopefully everyone finds it useful and educational....don't let the cover scare you away. :-) 

This video tutorial demonstrates the affect the UpdatePanel's UpdateMode and ChildrenAsTriggers properties have on updating a panel's content.  The video starts out by discussing the UpdateMode property and shows why you may want to know about it when using multiple UpdatePanel controls on a single page.  It then discusses the ChildrenAsTriggers property and shows how you can prevent child controls from updating their parent UpdatePanel control.  Examples of nesting UpdatePanel controls to provide a master-details style view of data is also shown.

I did some consulting work recently for a company that had a lot of JavaScript embedded in pages that was used used to perform advanced client-side functionality and make AJAX calls back to the server.  The company needed additional team members to be able to contribute to the application without spending a lot of time learning client-side Web technologies.  One solution was to provide good documentation of the JavaScript objects and methods that could be called.  This still required some fundamental knowledge of JavaScript though.  The focus, however, seemed to be on getting other team members involved with learning C# and server-side technologies so that they could also build back-end code tiers rather than having everyone spend time learning JavaScript and other related client-side technologies such as CSS and DHTML/DOM.

Microsoft's Betrand Le Roy just put together a great post on how to document JavaScript code in VS.NET Orcas.  By adding documentation comments, users of your script will get nice intellisense as they type and use JavaScript classes, methods, etc.  Nice stuff that we've all wanted for a long, long time.