While AJAX is the current rage for building interactive browser-based client applications, the action on the server side has focused on Web services. In fact, Web services have become the de-facto standard for exposing business functions at the server level. Given these conditions, a central development question becomes: How do you enable your AJAX-based applications to communicate with Web services? This article explores how you can use Microsoft Atlas (recently renamed to ASP.NET AJAX) to achieve just that.

To follow along, you'll need Visual Studio 2005 and Microsoft Atlas downloaded and installed. If you don't have Visual Studio 2005 installed, you can download a free Visual Studio Express version. This article explains how to interact with Web services through Atlas using an application I've called "ZipCodeRUs." The ZipCodeRUs application retrieves detailed ZIP code information such as the names of cities, counties, and their latitude, longitude, area code, etc. for up to three ZIP codes entered by the user. It relies on a free and publicly available Web service at tilisoft.com to retrieve the information. Full Article Here