Dino Esposito's "ASP.NET AJAX: Together at Last"

I grew up professionally reading Dino Esposito's "Cutting Edge" column at MSJournal, so I couldn't miss his presentation on "ASP.NET AJAX: Together at Last" here in Lisbon.

This was a great presentation, not only for the AJAX.NET immediate content, above all for his clear vision on the way technology has and will evolve.

He divided the presentation into two blocks: the easy way (basically partial rendering, an easy way to face-lift legacy apps) and the not-so-easy way (script services over some harder javascript integration).

But his message doesn't stop here. He looks at AJAX as a temporary patch for the user experience. From his blog:

[...]

Once the next Silverlight is available you can develop for the Web with much of the same ease you experience today for the desktop.

[...]

I believe that you just have two options--deluxe experience with a 100% Silverlight solution or normally rich Web experience with a combination of AJAX and Silverlight in the same ASP.NET page. With Silverlight used in this case as a rendering engine for special data.

Hope this cropping of Dino's post didn't altered too much what he meant, above all I think it is aligned with his presentation. In his vision XAML and CLR will have to replace HTML and javascript, technologies that as long surpassed their original objective and life expectancy.

My friends Tiago and Pedro will attend to the intensive 2-day class on "ASP.NET 3.5, AJAX and Silverlight" - I'm sure they'll soon have news for us.

Until then let me I'll drop you some links:

Solid Quality Mentors
Provider of advanced education and solutions for the entire Microsoft Data and Development Platforms

Easytronic
The guys that have brought Dino to Lisbon for the intensive class tutoring.

Web Development Helper
A browser extension to provide tools for the Web developer including ASP.NET page and control developers.

For those few that stayed through the QA, accessibility and security (by growing the contact surface) seemed like the great issues that remain with no easy answer.