A pleasant user experience requires a page to load very fast. This can be difficult when there is a large query taking place or when a web service is being used.
I deally, the entire page should be loaded first with loading images everywhere a cumbersome task takes place.
In ASP.NET, this can be accomplished using update panels and a 1 second trigger. The trigger would load some data and then the updatepanel will the update. This approach may be less popular if you do not require entire asp.net page life cycle events to fire. With this approach, allot of methods will fire consuming more resources and time. What if you simply want to display data?
Another aproach would be to create an .ashx httphandler that returns a representation of data in html format. A timer would go off one second after the page loads which triggers a div panel to be populated with the html returned from the .ashx handler. This would bring high performance but you would lose postbacks and viewstate. I suppose that is expected when losing the asp.net page-life cycle.
How would you go about creating a delayed task that uses viewstate and postback if possible that brings great performance?
Maybe creating an http handler to a custom extension, and in the implementation of the handler return the data (or pre-formatted html, json, or xml) that you then insert into an html element of the container page with a javascript ajax call.
Hugo