Technology question

[zabrucewayne]

Hi All

I am a familiar with desktop development (VB6/ .net), and would appreciate some help getting into web development.

Basically I am designing a web application in ASP.NET that shows the status of some components in our system.

Simple HTML output is fine to display the status, but as http is essentially connectionless, I am having a problem getting the client to update when the web app is notified of a state change.

I have tried a few things, namely
1. Automatically refreshing the page every now and then.
2. Using a frames and having a hidden page to request the data, check if it has changed, then trigger a page refresh etc.

These are bad solutions at best.

I am thinking that I need to explore the ActiveX / Java applet route.

What are my options? Is ActiveX on its way out? Is a java applet compatible with asp.net?

Is there some way of having a 'connected' page in asp.net, or way of having an object on the client that is connected to the web app?

Any help is appreciated,
Thanks!

[ray326]

Actually, #1 is a much better solution than complicating things with applets. But check out the Inner Browsing article on http://devedge.netscape.com for another rather innovative way to handle that situation.