I recently was working on an Asp.Net project that contained quite a few search pages. These pages all followed a similar structured pattern where the user had a set of fields they could filter on by typing in values and pressing the search button. The results were displayed in a GridView where the user could sort by clicking on column headers, export the results to excel, etc... To help improve user experience, we placed each of the GridViews in an asp UpdatePanel so while the user refined the search (sorting, adding or removing additional filters), only the GridView would be refreshed and not the entire page. Additionally, we wanted to add a few standard UI cues (disabling the Search button, fading out the GridView, and placing a progress indicator over the GridView) letting the user know an operation was currently in progress.
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http://mattberseth.com/blog/2007/05/ajaxnet_example_using_an_updat.html