Users can be impatient while waiting for data to be returned to a page (I'll admit I'm guilty of this occasionally).  Fortunately, ASP.NET AJAX makes it easy to handle cases where impatient users continually click a refresh button (or other type of button) in an ASP.NET AJAX page causing extra load to be placed on your server.

I'm a big fan of tracing in .NET and use it in every project I work on since it's a great way to find out why things aren't working properly.  Tracing is especially useful when an application works in a test environment but not in production.  My good buddy Michael Palermo recently wrote a nice post on how to dynamically grab the name of a method when using tracing which is a great idea.  Mike's post made me think about a question I'm often asked: "How do you perform tracing in classes that don't have direct access to the ASP.NET TraceContext object?".

For those taking the Distributed Application Programming course this week with me (or anyone else who is interested), you can download some samples I put together below.  You'll find samples of creating and consuming Web Services, creating remoting clients and servers, using MSMQ and securing SOAP messages using WSE 3.0. 

ASP.NET AJAX provides an UpdateProgress control that greatly simplifies the process of providing users with visual feedback as asynchronous postback operations occur in AJAX applications.  By using the control you can easily show an image, Flash movie, Silverlight animation, etc. while an AJAX asynchronous postback operation is in process.

If you have to create or consume Web Services then you've likely come across the WS-* protocols that exist in varying forms.  Here's a few of them:

I recently completed a new article for .NET Insight that discusses different ways to provide visual feedback to end users as asynchronous postback requests are made from AJAX-enabled pages.  The first technique discussed is the UpdateProgress control which is extremely simple to get going and doesn't require any knowledge of JavaScript out of the box.  The second technique uses the PageRequestManager client-side class to animate an UpdatePanel as a partial-page update occurs.  The article and associated code can be viewed at the following URL:

Awhile back I released a video that discussed working with UpdatePanel control properties such as UpdateMode and ChildrenAsTriggers.  I've had several requests to make the code shown available and finally got around to doing that.  Those that are interested can download the code here.  If you'd like to watch the video you can view it at the link below.