The ASP.NET Ajax Library Beta was released today! The five big things I’m going to talk about in this post are:
- The ASP.NET Ajax Library is now in Beta
- Contributing the ASP.NET Ajax Library to the CodePlex Foundation
- Merging the Ajax Control Toolkit with the ASP.NET Ajax Library
- Plans to provide support for the ASP.NET Ajax Library
- ASP.NET Ajax Library features that provide:
- Powerful developer libraries and tooling support
- Performance – build high performance websites
- Interoperability – use it with any server platform and alongside jQuery
- Extensible – build on top of the library and inherit from controls like DataView
Since July last year the team has been cranking out new features in 6 previews, each with exciting innovations including powerful productivity benefits for developers, performance enhancements to make your website faster and making the library interoperable with multiple server platforms and other JavaScript libraries like jQuery.
Contributing the ASP.NET Ajax Library to the CodePlex Foundation
When it comes to the web, open source and licensing is important – see yesterday’s Open Web Foundation (OWF) announcement about Microsoft’s contributions in the Open Web. The ASP.NET Ajax Library is the first project to be contributed to the CodePlex Foundation and we are incredibly excited because it allows the project to take other contributions by the community and be driven by your feedback. The ASP.NET Ajax Library will be distributed under the New BSD license.
Merging the Ajax Control Toolkit with the ASP.NET Ajax Library
Before today, the Ajax Control Toolkit (ACT) was an impressively popular download from CodePlex.com with 25,000 downloads per week. ACT provides, and will continue to provide, loads of rich controls for ASP.NET Web Forms developers to add Ajax experiences to their web applications without the need to write client-side code. In ASP.NET Ajax Beta, we have converted 34 controls to pure client script, so now developers who write client-side code (including ASP.NET MVC, PHP and Ruby on Rail developers etc.) can use them in their web applications too. As a bonus we’ve also made it possible to instantiate the ACT controls as jQuery Plugins – part of the interoperability efforts we have been making. (More on that later.)
Here’s an example of instantiating a Watermark ACT control using the new syntax:
- <script src="../scripts/start.debug.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
- <script src="../scripts/extended/ExtendedControls.debug.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
-
- <script type="text/javascript">
-
- Sys.require(Sys.components.watermark, function () {
- Sys.create.watermark("#input1", "Enter something...");
- });
-
- </script>
Plans to provide support for the ASP.NET Ajax Library
Knowing that there is someone on the end of the phone to talk to about an issue is important to our developers. When the full version of the ASP.NET Ajax Library is released Microsoft will provide full product support. We already provide full support for jQuery and we will continue this going forward.
ASP.NET Ajax Library features
Power for developers
Performance
Interoperability
Extensibility
Useful Links
Here are some links that you will find useful: