The UpdatePanelAnimationExtender is an interesting and useful extender control found in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit that enables you to run animations when an UpdatePanel control updates or has finished updating on the client. The sample on the control toolkit website shows how you can animate the UpdatePanel when it updates by leveraging the extender control.

                However, because the Animation framework is quite extensive, you can also do many interesting things to controls outside of the UpdatePanel when it updates by leveraging a bit of JavaScript and the UpdatePanelAnimationExtender. This is possible without the UpUpdatePanelAnimationExtender, but by using it you can accomplish scripting in a much cleaner and manageable manner. For example, say I wanted to disable a button outside of my UpdatePanel when the panel updates:

                To do this with the UpdatePanelAnimationExtender is trivial, you simply add the Extender to your page:

                Note that it has an Animations sub-element; this is where you place the Animations you want ran when the UpdatePanel updates or has finished updating (OnUpdating and OnUpdated respectively).  Now, you can add any animations under the event nodes, but I want to add some script to disable the button and re-enable it when the UpdatePanel has finished refreshing:

                Now your script is clearly and concisely placed within Animation event framework where you can make it invisible, disabled, etc. To me this is a much nicer solution than writing script directly into the page output.