ASP.NET AJAX beta 2 is released
Well, just a few short weeks and some very late nights after the first beta was released, we have released beta 2 of ASP.NET AJAX. There are three different pieces you can download:
1) ASP.NET AJAX Extensions beta 2 is available here. This is the core part of the ASP.NET AJAX offering and required for the other parts to work. It includes the Microsoft AJAX Library which is the JavaScript libraries that can be used in the browser for more easily writing maintainable object-oriented JavaScript code that interacts with the DOM. The Microsoft AJAX Library can be downloaded separately as a zip file here.
2) The ASP.NET AJAX 2.0 Futures November CTP is available here. This naming is a little different than what we have used before. This is a set of functionality that builds on top of the core ASP.NET AJAX Extensions release. Some of the code has been around awhile and continues to evolve, while some of what we will include in the Futures CTP may shift more dramatically based on feedback and further scenario work.
3) The AJAX Control Toolkit is available here. It builds on top of the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions but does not requires the Futures CTP. This rich set of controls, behaviors and extenders are released with the source code. Developers-at-large contribute to the code and are the major driving force behind the release. A special thanks to the team for reacting to some late breaking changes.
Speaking of late breaking changes, there are a couple of things about beta 2 that you should know. Sorry that this post looks like a list of lists.
1) Scripts resource requests are now routed to a new handler. You need the following line in the <handlers> section of your web.config for things to work with beta 2.
<add verb="GET" path="ScriptResource.axd" type="Microsoft.Web.Handlers.ScriptResourceHandler" validate="false"/>
2) Script pages you include using the ScriptManager need a new line at the bottom to alert the client-side runtime that the script has loaded. This is to provide functionality in browsers that don't have the same eventing semantics.
As always, I welcome your feedback as you start using the release. We are feature complete now and the release date is driven entirely by dealing withing any lingering issues we have missed. Major feature work and further work on Futures CTP items will be slated for our next release
