I love seeing updates to the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit; I’ve always been on the lookout for updates to ASP.NET AJAX. There are various AJAX add in solutions, but I think this one is by far the most popular.

Yesterday the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit team ajax.asp.net web-site.

• The ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit is a free download and contains more than 40 additional AJAX controls and components that work on top of the core ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 release. In addition to having Microsoft developers contribute, the project also has more than 15 non-Microsoft contributors adding great features and controls.

• You can download either a binary version of the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit to use (just add to your toolbox and you are good to go), or you can download the source for the project itself and tweak/extend it if you want (all source is released under a permissive license allowing you to make your own modifications to it).

New ToolkitScriptCombiner Support

• One of the biggest improvements with this toolkit release is support for a new “ToolkitScriptCombiner” control. This control allows you to replace the default control behavior, and supports the ability to dynamically merge multiple client-side JavaScript scripts into a single file that is downloaded to the client at runtime. Better yet, only the JavaScript needed by the specific controls on the page are included within the combined download, to make it as small as possible.
• The big benefit with this feature is that is can significantly reduce the number of JavaScript files the browser needs to download, as well as reduce the overall download size of the scripts. This can provide some really nice performance and load-time wins on pages. Best of all - you don’t need to change any code or refactor any script yourself to take advantage of this.

Other ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Improvements

• This week’s release contains a number of other new improvements, including: More than 125 bug fixes
• Extended client side event support - new client side event handler extensibility points are available with common toolkit server controls
• ASP.NET Validation Controls now work with the Toolkit Controls
• Accessibility fixes: Slider and AutoComplete have support for high contrast and other controls have JAWS accessibility support built-in when doing AJAX callbacks.
• Animation support: More toolkit controls now have generic animation support built-in
• Nice design mode improvements for the controls, including: 1) designer support for the TabContainer. You can now select/add/remove tabs within the tab container directly from the designer, and you can directly edit the content and the title, 2) page methods can now automatically be generated for those extender controls that call web-services, 3) nice icon support within the toolbox*."

Source

New ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Release

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