AJAX best-practice page design

This may seem like a trivial question, but I have been away from web-based programming for some time and am not sure what the current best-practice is for page layout. Over the years there have been many approaches to web page design: frames, tables, masterpages, etc...

I'm asking because i'm trying to make an AJAX web-app with toolbars above and to the side of the content. Take a look at the current pages atwww.stairmand.com. There isn't any real content linked to the menus, but its enough to demonstrate my question. I managed to place the content in the correct position using an iframe (which i don't like), but i'd like to acheive an AJAX style content area... with "loading"images, etc. The problem is that the content is all dynamically generated in asp.net too, and I haven't worked out a way to place this in a div dynamically.

I'm sure there must be a really simple way to do this, either directly using javascript or one of the Ajax Toolkit components, but i'm stuck! I manage to put a static html string into a div with no problem, but how do i do this with dynamic pages - for example to return a datagrid. Help!!!!

if you want a page that is changed depending on selections made above and to the side menus of the page i would use a masterpage with a iframe. The master page can then use its menu options to tell the iframe where to go while keeping the menus in their current state

Ok.. in that case it seems like i'm doing the right thing. Is it possible to show an "updating" image while the i frame is loading?

yes, using ajax you can place this item called the "UpdateProgress" on a page. Basically you tie this to an update panel and set a time in milliseconds. This time determins after how long of the update panels loading time should the contents of the updateprogress should be shown. So if updateProgress contaings the word loading and a .gif pic that spins around, as soon as the update panel has spent more then the entered amount of time loading, the text and image will be shown to the user and take away when the panel is loaded

better yet just watch this, it will show you everything

http://www.asp.net/learn/videos/view.aspx?tabid=63&id=123

Excellent.

Thanks very much for your help!

no problem. if this info helped please mark as an answer, it gimes me points, which boost my confidence in all aspects of my life

You can use UpdateProgress Control for it..

Here you will get details..

http://ajax.asp.net/docs/overview/UpdateProgressOverview.aspx