Automatic page refreshes were a big pain point in SharePoint 2007. If you had a page or list that you wished to refresh at regular intervals, so it the event that another user entered items, the screen would update, there was no easy/direct way of doing this. You could of could add using the Content Editor Web Part but this refreshes entire the entire page.
To overcome this, SharePoint 2010 introduces a new Ajax option has been added to many webparts to enable auto refresh of webpart without refreshing the entire web page. This feature is available out of the box in SharePoint 2010 and no additional development is required.
How to use Auto Refresh Web parts in SharePoint 2010:
In SharePoint 2010, web parts have a new section in their tool panes - Ajax Options:
The key option is the Enable Asynchronous Automatic Refresh. Checking this will enable the Auto Refresh feature on the webpart. The Auto Refreshing Interval is the time interval in which webpart will get refreshed automatically.
Implementation:
To demonstrate the implementation I created a custom list and added several items. Next, I added the list to a page as a web part. Editing the web part, I selected the checkbox to enable the automatic refresh and left the interval at the default 60 seconds (as shown above). I clicked Ok to save the settings and then saved the page (using the Stop Editing button) and thus generated a page with an auto-refreshing web part showing the contents of the custom list:
