Microsoft announces immediate availability of ASP.NET AJAX Beta 1 which represents a significant number of improvements from previously available public builds. Scott Guthrie provides an overview of the release of in a blog posting.
There are a number of significant improvements included in this release:
- The JavaScript closure-based classes were removed and replaced with prototype-defined classes to lower memory usage.
- Safari support was added with a promise to suppor Opera in the future.
- Much improved support for debugging in Visual Studio 2005.
- An improved JavaScript automated build environment
- A host of improvements to the UpdatePanel.
- Performance work to optimize the javascript call-backs to reduce network traffic.
New with this release, Microsoft is splitting the download into 3 parts:
- ASP.NET Ajax Core - the core sdk.
- ASP.NET AJAX Value-Add - collection of higher level features.
- ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit - collection of 28 free AJAX-enabled controls whose source is maintained on CodePlex.