Republished with Permission - Original Article
The ASP.NET team today released a significant new update of the Microsoft Ajax
Library (Preview 6). This update includes a bunch of new capabilities and
improvements to our client-side AJAX library, and can be used with any version
of ASP.NET (including ASP.NET 2.0, 3.5 and 4.0), and can be used in both
ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC projects. Today’s release includes the
following feature improvements:
Better Imperative Syntax: A new, simplified, code syntax for
creating client controls.
Client Script Loader: A new client-side script loader that
can dynamically load all of the JavaScript files required by a client control
or library automatically, and executes the scripts in the right order.
Better jQuery Integration: All Microsoft Ajax controls are
now automatically exposed as jQuery plug-ins.
In addition to the client library improvements, we also
today released a new (free) Microsoft AJAX Minifier tool. This tool
allows you to substantially improve the performance of your websites by
reducing the size of your JavaScript files. It can be run both as a
command-line tool, and also ships as a Visual Studio MSBuild task that you can
integrate into your VS projects to automatically minify your JavaScript files
whenever you do a build.