Searching for my lost shaker of salt

Let's face it, AJAX is the sliced bread of the Internet these days. And with all the toolkits out there, like Microsoft's AJAX for ASP.NET, it isn't a huge deal to Ajaxify an application. But with all the cool visual enhancements AJAX can bring to the user, we must also remember the whole "user experience" thing. That means feedback of some kind to let the user know a micro-postback is occurring and "something" is happening. Using the Microsoft AJAX Library, this is very easily accomplished. Inside of an ASP:UpdatePanel you simply use a ASP:UpdatePanelStatus template to put in some kind of message or animation to offer the user feedback that an operation is taking place. This article describes in detail how to do it. It also has a link to this site where you can create custom animations for your "working..." messages.