News

DevExpress Takes over Development of the Microsoft AJAX Control Toolkit

The open source library for developing AJAX-Webified apps gets a much-needed face lift to get with the modern coding times.

Microsoft can only do so much. That's the feeling one gets, as the company nearly cops to being busy in other fairly significant areas of its business (Visual Studio 2015, obviously, but then there's the upcoming Windows 10). Case in point: "It's been 15 months since a significant update was released for the AJAX Control Toolkit on CodePlex," Jeffrey T. Fritz said in a blog post. "In the time since then, our friends at DevExpress have stepped up and offered to lead this open source project."

That's right. Rather than put development of the AJAX Control Toolkit on hold even longer, Fritz said that development has been headed by its close partner and Microsoft controls builder. DevExpress, in fact, took over the reins around September 2014, and it released a new version, dubbed 15.1, that consists mainly of features and updates to stabilize the release.

A blog from DevExpress Web Program Manager Mehul Harry (which, we're fairly certain, is not related to Microsoft's Brian Harry) said there were more than 2,000 issues that destabilized the product. "So the first job was prioritizing them and solving the major blocking ones (in the end, totaling nearly one-third of those 2,200)," he wrote.

Besides those fixes, Harry said that the installer had been streamlined, supported more modern browsers and now is able to work with Visual Studio 2013 templates. The toolkit now also contains one assembly that supports all versions of the Microsoft .NET Framework newer than version 3.5, and code deemed useless has been pared from it to streamline it.

The AJAX Control Toolkit is simply a library of controls that works on top of ASP.NET AJAX, which developers can use to build client-side Web projects based on HTML5 and CSS. You can get more details on the Toolkit from Mehul Harry.

About the Author

You Tell 'Em, Readers: If you've read this far, know that Michael Domingo, Visual Studio Magazine Editor in Chief, is here to serve you, dear readers, and wants to get you the information you so richly deserve. What news, content, topics, issues do you want to see covered in Visual Studio Magazine? He's listening at [email protected].

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • AI for GitHub Collaboration? Maybe Not So Much

    No doubt GitHub Copilot has been a boon for developers, but AI might not be the best tool for collaboration, according to developers weighing in on a recent social media post from the GitHub team.

  • Visual Studio 2022 Getting VS Code 'Command Palette' Equivalent

    As any Visual Studio Code user knows, the editor's command palette is a powerful tool for getting things done quickly, without having to navigate through menus and dialogs. Now, we learn how an equivalent is coming for Microsoft's flagship Visual Studio IDE, invoked by the same familiar Ctrl+Shift+P keyboard shortcut.

  • .NET 9 Preview 3: 'I've Been Waiting 9 Years for This API!'

    Microsoft's third preview of .NET 9 sees a lot of minor tweaks and fixes with no earth-shaking new functionality, but little things can be important to individual developers.

  • Data Anomaly Detection Using a Neural Autoencoder with C#

    Dr. James McCaffrey of Microsoft Research tackles the process of examining a set of source data to find data items that are different in some way from the majority of the source items.

  • What's New for Python, Java in Visual Studio Code

    Microsoft announced March 2024 updates to its Python and Java extensions for Visual Studio Code, the open source-based, cross-platform code editor that has repeatedly been named the No. 1 tool in major development surveys.

Most   Popular

Subscribe on YouTube