ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Released

Undoubtably this will be a hot topic for the day... ASP.NET AJAX 1.0, formerly known as Atlas, is finally out! Check it out, download it, and check out the extensive documentation as well.

I was just looking at the past blog posts on ASP.NET AJAX and Atlas, and one nice thing about a blog is being able to trace through some of the history and evolution of the product...

• Over a year back, Atlas was first announced... still remember the evening at TechEd 2005, after a long day of presentations, when ScottGu and I were talking about seriously looking into this once we got back to Redmond (wow that feels quite a while back now). As reported here, we called it Comet at first, before settling on the Atlas code name.
• Between then and the first public unveiling of Atlas at PDC05, we basically learnt the wonders (and the pain points) of JavaScript, building a type system, prototyping all sorts of things, really using the capabilities of the browser... we had just scratched the surface with ASP.NET 2.0.
• I posted my architecture slide and writeup... it is interesting to see how a lot of it has carried forward into the shipping product. By the way we if you look at the slide carefully, you'll notice something called "Atlas Client Application Services" ... that idea hasn't gone away, its still in the works... in my own personal vision, I see WPF/E as the first step in building that out. Stay tuned for more on that ... working on that... and in due time, this will be blogged about as well. :-)
• Over the following months, we released multiple CTPs, and continually got great response and feedback from the community. I think the super-popular UpdatePanel and Partial Rendering first released in the M1 build of Atlas are perhaps the best example of great feedback, resulting in features that not only demo well, but are truly an effective way to quickly ajaxify a broad range of ASP.NET applications.
• Since then we've come a long way, having introduced the notion of Extender controls, and a whole swath of them along with source in the form of the AJAX Control Toolkit

So once again, check out the bits, and keep the feedback coming... we're on our way to more cool stuff in this area!

If you have suggestions for what you'd like to hear about in terms of more in-depth details, please do suggest via comments below. Also stay tuned for some additional controls I'll be posting in the next couple of days... first and foremost will be a new version of UpdateHistory (the server control that allows you to fix the back button problem) sync'd to the v1.0 release... that so many of you have emailed me about. And for being so patient, I've got another new control that goes along with the whole UpdatePanel paradigm. :-)