Continuing this week’s theme of catching up on posts I should have spotted during the last two weeks of December, here’s an interesting one from Somasegar:

It’s been a busy 24 hours!

The RC of ASP.NET AJAX shipped last night, and is now available to download from the Microsoft site.

Looking at the changelog whitepaper there have been a fair few bits and pieces moved about. The RC is being offered alongside a ‘Futures’ CTP. Together they comprise all of the functionality that was available in earlier CTP releases (the RTM release has a cut-down feature set; you’ll have to wait until ‘Orcas’ in 2007 to get the whole package).

A couple of quick gotchas:

• The ASP.NET AJAX namespace has been changed from Microsoft.Web.Extensions.dll to System.Web.Extensions.dll with the server functionality moving from Microsoft.Web to System.Web (this is to make upgrading to ASP.NET ‘Orcas’ easier, since the namespaces won’t need to change again – you’ll just select the preferred runtime in web.conf).


• There’s now a true ASP.NET AJAX template available from File | New Projects in VS 2005, so you can start building ASP.NET AJAX applications directly.


• Something’s changed within the globalisation support, but I’ve not worked that out yet; Scott Guthrie provides a pointer on his blog.