jQuery UI + ASP.NET UpdatePanel - Is it worth it?

No, it's not worth it. If the toolkit's calendar and modalpopup extenders are working for you, then just hold on to them.

In future projects, stay away from asp.net ajax and use jQuery exclusively. This way you wont run into any of the updatepanel problems. ASP.NET 4.0 Webforms are going to make using jQuery much easier in the past, because you will have more control of how controls get named when they are rendered to HTML.

We use Microsoft AJAX (only using UpdatePanels) and jQuery and all works great.

Using UpdatePanels makes all UserControls, Postbacks, Viewstate etc work as you would expect with the UI enhancements of jQuery. There are a few things to learn in getting them to work together and until we find an alternative we will continue to do this. We think its worth it.

I would be keen to see how UpdatePanels can be easily replaced with jQuery, but I expect one would need to write additional code for each UpdatePanel replacement, rather than letting asp.net handle things? Are there any articles out there that demonstrate replacing UpdatePanels that contain asp.net controls and UserControls with events etc?

I'm working on a project with a lot of UpdatePanel and jQuery, things just work fine.

Yes, it is a period when you need to learn, to make things work.

If you have a lot of UpdatePanels and you don't want to remove them then this is understandable, and using jQuery is just improving the UI, so it's not going to much worse.

Also jQuery has functionalitys related to AJAX,so you can make elegant client side coding with jQuery which is not related to Design and ui stuff.

I think if you search for jQuery and Ajax on the internet you will find a bunch of good examples, and fine techniques to both technologies together.

PS:

• Remenber that UpdatePanel is evil in sort of way when you are using in an inappropriate way.

• UpdatePanel is (and generally AJAX) is very customizable, make time for yourself to optimize it

Good luck!