Thank you for your help. It took a few days to work through the problems, but I finally am able to call a web service .asmx fle's functions from JavaScript on the client. There were two problems with my code. The first problem is this line was missing from my .ascx file:
<%@ Register assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" namespace="System.Web.UI" tagprefix="asp" %>
I never had to worry about it while I was using UpdatePanels because I made a practice of dragging the UpdatePanel control from the toolbox to the web control in Design mode. Visual Studio always created the @ Register line for me. Without this line, the reference to the ScriptManager, as follows, returned Nothing:
objScriptManager = ScriptManager.GetCurrent(Me.Page)
The other problem was in my .ascx.vb code in setting the path for the ServiceReference. I was doingthis:
objServiceReference.Path = "Talk.asmx"
when I should have been doing this:
objServiceReference.Path = ResolveUrl("Talk.asmx")
The .asmx file is in the same folder as the web control, but the full path is required.
-Pat