Well, very early this morning as the East Coast was just waking up, the ASP.NET crew was cleaning up the finishing touches for the beta release of ASP.NET AJAX Beta 1.

Over on Scott's blog you can read more about the changes in Beta1 from the previously released CTPs. Some of the added features include:

• The download was split into 3 downloads to facilitate faster downloading of the core SDK.
• Work was done to optimize the javascript call-backs to reduce network traffic.
• Changed from using JavaScript closure-based classes to using prototype-defined classes, result lower memory usage.
• Support for Safari as well as Opera support is coming, but not stable yet.
• Improved support for debugging in VS2005 as well as enhancements to the automated build environment.
• Many improvements to the UpdatePanel.
• A promise to include a Source modification license in a future release.

Very very cool!