At the PDC (our dev conference) we release the Beta version of the ASP.NET Ajax Library and also donated it to the CodePlex Foundation as their first project.  For this version of the library we’ve focused on four areas of functionality:

Power for developers

• Build data-centric web apps using advanced client-side libraries and controls
• Keep your markup clean and standards-compliant with imperative coding
• Make it easier to code using JavaScript IntelliSense (autocomplete) in Visual Studio
• Keep it simple to load and execute your scripts using the advanced management and execution features of the Script Loader

Performance

• Use the Microsoft Ajax CDN for lightning-fast downloads of the Microsoft Ajax Library and jQuery
• Reduce the number of requests to the server using script combining in the Script Loader
• Reduce the size of your scripts using the Microsoft Ajax Minifier Tool

Interoperability

• Create apps that work across all browsers and any platform, including ASP.NET, PHP, and Ruby on Rails
• Use powerful jQuery selection syntax and Ajax Control Toolkit controls together
• Explore the code and make modifications -- it’s open source!

Extensibility

• Create your own controls by extending ones like the DataView class

Getting detailed about Performance

Dan Wahlin and I put together the following whitepaper that talks about how you can use the features in ASP.NET Ajax Library to speed up the performance of your web applications.  You can download the PDF here or read it below:

Today we launched the Windows Server 2008 R2 Learning Centers on Channel9 – congrats to the team!  There’s great content on there including labs, videos, presentations etc covering a wide range of topics from performance and efficiency to extensibility.

Learn deployment, scale and extensibility

As a web developer, there are some lessons that of particular interest to me that teach me how to deploy and scale my web application and make sure it’s running lightning quick.  All this is covered in the “Extensible Web Platform” lesson.

Give your native code apps an API just like web apps

Also, I often want to create APIs for my web applications that allow other developers to interact with it and help create a rich ecosystem of apps that add value on top of my platform (think Twitter).  We’ve already showed you how you can do this using REST APIs (check out the Web App Toolkit for REST Services).  The Extreme Web Services course shows you how you can now do the same for your native code applications built in C++ etc.

Need Scale? There’s an extension for that!

If you need ultimate scale for your web applications be sure to check out the free extension called Application Routing Request which allows administrators to optimize resource utilization for application servers to reduce management costs for Web server farms and shared hosting environments.  Check out the blog post from the product team and see how Inernap are using it today to cut costs whilst improving scale and reporting.