During last TechEd in Barcelona, Jan and Patrick delivered a session "Building Web Parts the Smart Way", where they showed the power of the SmartPart. As we launched ASP.NET AJAX during the conference - which resulted in an AJAX pre-conference and 7 AJAX related sessions - there was quite some interest from SharePoint developers in how to get ASP.NET AJAX to work with SharePoint. A lot of people have been looking into this. See Jan's AJAX-related blog posts for more resources. But this was something that wasn't covered during TechEd: Developers.

Last Thursday Jan took the time to build on the groundwork of Eric Schoonover and ASP.NET AJAX-enable the SmartPart. Read the how-to guide in his blog post and have a look at the screencast in which demonstrates the use of ASP.NET AJAX together with the SmartPart, from within SharePoint.

This often used technique will enhance the user experience of web parts running in SharePoint environments but it will also ease the life of web developers when enabling existing applications with ASP.NET AJAX.

Jan promised to do a full web cast on the "SmartPart with AJAX support" for the MSDN Belux web site. Watch our blogs for more news on the availability of the web cast.