I have written a few posts on PageMethods (most notably here and here… there are probably a few more, but that will suffice), and have received a couple requests for help with them in the new renamed betas.
First of all in case you haven’t seem it, Shawne Burke has the De Facto post on them here. Why have I pointed to his post and not made one of my own? Well, honestly I’ve been a little busy lately, but more importantly, I’ve yet to make the things work.
Now the good news. The MS Ajax team has done a great job of making them work just about everywhere, so from what I have read they now can be used in place of a service just about anywhere.
The bad news? Beyond the obvious issues brought up in Shawne’s post… well, check out this post over on ASP.NET forums. Pay particular attention to Rick Strahl’s comments.
You see that by making PageMethods work across the board they made them too much like WebService methods and as a result there now is no real advantage to using one over the other. I’m not sure whether this will get fixed in the next version or not (I would think that it shouldn’t be that difficult to do). Hang on… I’m in a wait and see mode myself.