Yep, it's been ages. On the off chance anyone's actually reading this, I recently wrote two Code Project articles.
1. Unobtrusive AJAX Form Validation. A basic guide to walk you through some surprisingly poorly documented functionality.
2. Dynamic Querying with LINQ-to-EF and Expressions. A kung-fu level data access approach that could be used to provide data from a service to a searchable/sortable grid.
