Build an AJAX Contact Us Form using partial-page updates in ASP.NET

Intro | Part 1 | Part 2

As promised in the intro of this three-part series, you and I are going to build an AJAX Contact Us form in ASP.NET, a couple of different ways. Today we’re going to look to Visual Studio’s built in ASP.NET AJAX controls to do dynamic partial-page updates, and we’ll leave client-side network callbacks through a web service for a future post. To keep things moving, I’m going to assume that you are comfortable using Visual Studio. If you need to brush up, there are some great tutorials at ASP.NET.

You can download the source files for this project AJAXEnabledContactForm.zip (46 kb).

To start, I created a new AJAX Enabled Web Application in Visual Studio (you can find the free Visual Studio Express Edition here). I called the project “AjaxEnabledContactForm”, but you can call it whatever you want.

Next, I implement a Specified Pickup Directory method to test our contact form, and allow our web app to save notification emails to our c:\Temp\ folder. You can find the specifics of adding this to your own project in my post on The SMTP Alternative, but to keep this short, the code you need to add to your web.config file is as follows:

Now, we need a page for our Contact Us form. I created a new page, called it "PartialPageUpdate.aspx", and added the following content to the body. More...