We have developed a Visual Web Part for Sharepoint 2010 with Visual Studio 2010 (Visual Web Part project template).
The web part loads some stuff and shows a list of items. It takes some seconds to do this, so we need to load it async. through ajax to avoid delay in the page load. We also need to refresh it every X seconds (async too).
I'm new at Sharepoint, but I have some .NET expertise.
What would be the best approach to accomplish this? Does Page Methods exist in Sharepoint? For the client-side part would you go for jQuery?
UPDATE
I have tried with the ASP.NET Timer + UpdatePanel solution but I'm getting lots of Javascript errors. I've found this possible solution, but I can't find that DLL and anyway I think that's for Sharepoint 2007