In his keynote address to the 2007 Microsoft TechEd Developers conference, Technical Strategy senior vice president Eric Rudder announced the release of ASP.NET AJAX Beta 2. Previously codenamed ATLAS, Microsoft's AJAX technology (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) enables web pages to respond more dynamically, refreshing only parts of a page without flicker to build richer content and a better experience for the user.
ASP.NET AJAX Beta 2 consists of fully supported extensions to Microsoft's ASP.NET 2.0 includes many new components to enable developers to create client-side and server-side functionality. The full support means that enterprise customers will be able to develop and launch AJAX enabled web sites with the confidence that, should they encounter a problem Microsoft will work with them to find a solution or produce a hotfix.
Also available is a Community Technology Preview of the AJAX Futures package. This includes further controls and technologies which are not yet fully supported.
The ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit is a collaborative shared-source project being built by both Microsoft and non-Microsoft developers creating new client and server controls which expand on the functionality of the Microsoft AJAX Extensions.
Adding AJAX functionality to existing ASP.NET projects in any version of Visual Studio 2005 takes only a couple of extra lines of code or the addition of a new control to a page but enables a richer user experience such as drag and drop or dynamic expanding menus without flicker and at high speed.
