About 2 weeks ago (on January 25th), I gave a presentation on Creating Rich Interactive Web Applications Using AJAX. I just posted the deck at
http://www.weblogging.com/decks/ajax.ppt. The deck is mostly intended for the attendees as the slides by themselves do not convey the full intent of the talk.
Lessons from the Trenches: Engineering Great AJAX Experiences
Explore the challenges and lessons learned developing the Windows Live and Gadgets Web client frameworks powering Windows Live, Hotmail (Kahuna beta), Spaces, and more. This technical talk presents design and architectural considerations for building interactive AJAX-like sites. See how componentization, network management, accessibility, page composition, and more impact the design and engineering of your Web application.
The focus of the talk is to look well beyond AJAX to explore challenges in designing and engineering your web application. I believe the paradigm shift is not so much focused on AJAX (which is merely a development pattern) but rather around the ability to remix and mashup the web. The remix concept is fundamental to how we are architecting our experiences across Windows Live. This talk explores the web client technical issues that need to be considered when building a rich (remixable) web-experience.