Two days ago, on Saturday, I attended Toronto Code Camp 2008, the third such event organized in our fair city. It was my first time at a Code Camp and I had a good time and learned a lot. In addition to attending some very interesting presentations and chatting with people from the ASP.NET community, I got to speak as well! My talk was about how ASP.NET AJAX exposes web services on the client, and how that can be connected with "client-centric" controls, such as those in Web.UI. After some introductory examples of accessing web services from client-side code, I demonstrated how ComponentArt TreeView and Grid can load data directly from web services using the ASP.NET AJAX.

Those interested can download the (simple, introductory) code samples here.

P.S. After the talk, Joel Tulloch pointed out to me that it isn’t necessary to mirror the server-side classes on the client by hand. We can use the GenerateScriptType attribute for this, as he describes on his blog. Very neat stuff.