AJAX Goes Gold -- Visual Studio Magazine

Desmond File

AJAX Goes Gold

Microsoft announced last Tuesday that it has shipped the ASP.NET AJAX development tools. The toolkit, codenamed "Atlas," consists of a server-side framework, a client-side JavaScript library and a controls toolkit. The package adds AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) support to ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005.

Microsoft had originally planned to ship the software with Visual Studio "Orcas" later this year. The runaway success of AJAX development, however, left Microsoft little choice but to get the tools out to developers right away. AJAX began beta testing in late October after several community technology preview (CTP) releases.

In an e-mail interview with Redmond Contributing News Editor Stuart Johnston, a company spokesman wrote: "This tool provides Web developers with the essential tools to simplify building next-generation, AJAX-style Web applications through seamless integration with the .NET Framework and Microsoft platform."

ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions will be available under the Microsoft Reference License (Ms-RL), which will enable developers to view the ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions code, thus aiding in application debugging, maintenance and interoperability, the spokesperson's e-mail said.

The ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX tools is available for download here.

Have you kicked the tires on the ASP.NET AJAX tools? What are your impressions and what could Microsoft do better? E-mail me at [email protected].

Posted by Michael Desmond on 01/31/2007

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Uno Platform Wants Microsoft to Improve .NET WebAssembly in Two Ways

Uno Platform, a third-party dev tooling specialist that caters to .NET developers, published a report on the state of WebAssembly, addressing some shortcomings in the .NET implementation it would like to see Microsoft address.
Random Neighborhoods Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the random neighborhoods regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other ML regression techniques, advantages are that it can handle both large and small datasets, and the results are highly interpretable.
As Some Orgs Restrict DeepSeek AI Usage, Microsoft Offers Models and Dev Guidance

While some organizations are restricting employee usage of the new open source DeepSeek AI from a Chinese company due to data collection concerns, Microsoft has taken a different approach.
Useful New-ish Features in .NET/C#

We often hear about the big new features in .NET or C#, but what about all of those lesser known, but useful new features? How exactly do you use constructs like collection indices and ranges, date features, and pattern matching?
TypeScript 5.8 Beta Speeds Program Loads, Updates

"TypeScript 5.8 introduces a number of optimizations that can both improve the time to build up a program, and also to update a program based on a file change in either --watch mode or editor scenarios."