I've got a web application I'm developing based on the ASP.NET 3.5 (c#) platform. For usability and speed, I plan to develop this application with heavy integration of the AJAX Control Toolkit. I'd planned to often refresh certain areas of the page based on actions by controls in other portions of the page (perhaps within UpdatePanels, but potentially within iframes -- or some combination of the two).

The problem I'm running into is developing a good routine to manage unique URL assignment. I've read a few articles on assigning URL hashes, but I haven't quite wrapped my head around the best scheme for assigning state information to the URL and -- going one step further -- a scheme for pulling that hash back out and making sense of it.

The following articles have got me thinking in the right direction. But, not being a big JavaScript guy (which will be kicking my butt for a while at the beginning of this project), it's not taking me very far.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc507641.aspx
http://ajaxpatterns.org/Unique_URLs

Any ideas / resources?