How to optimize AJAX in ASP.NET

Question

Hi,

I have the following situation: excel-like application, that is accessible from internet. 2 users access it and I want the moment one user clicks on a cell, the other user to see that. (like in google documents).

My questions are:

1. Can I do this using standard UpdatePanel, while I keep the bandwidth usage to its minimum (in other words, only information for the current cell is passed, not the whole huge table), or should I implement my own ajax scripts on the page in order to get it optimized.
2. How to do the updating : one way is to have a timer on the page and update it periodacally, the other way is to make a request and keep the connection opened till a change is made (using some heavy timeout, let's say 1 minute).

Can you give me clues (like ajax libraries I can use, can I do this with the standard ajax controls in asp.net, ways to implement the live connection)?

Any help appreciated.

Answer 1

I asked similar question here

and got some results. It seems that disabling ViewState and setting UpdateMode to each of the UpdatePanels to Conditional is essential to optimizing the request-responses. This is close to maximum optimizing it this way. Other way is not to use UpdatePanel at all.