Developing AJAX based popup notifications

ASP.NET AJAX opens a wide range of possibilities to developers. One of them is periodic pinging of database and check for changes to the data. It is certainly not a new technique and developers achieved it in the past using JavaScript and XMLHTTP. However, with the help of ASP.NET AJAX the same task becomes much simple. In this article I will illustrate a possible approach for notifying the end user of any changes made to the database. The notifications are displayed in a popup to catch the attention of the user.