This week my team released updates of the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit as well as the Visual Studio Web Deployment project packager. Both of these updates are designed to work with VS 2008 and .NET 3.5.
ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit
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 functionality now built-into .NET 3.5 (and available as a separate download for ASP.NET 2.0). In addition to having Microsoft developers contribute, the project also has dozens of non-Microsoft contributors adding great features and controls.
The ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit update shipped this week fixes some issues that people were running into when using the control toolkit's extender controls with the VS 2008 Web designer. The only change made was to adjust the version string number of the control toolkit assemblies (David Anson has more details of the change here). I'd definitely recommend downloading the update if you are using VS 2008 or Visual Web Developer 2008 Express.
You can also find a steady stream of articles about ASP.NET AJAX and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit via my Link Listing series (in particular check my post here for a dedicated ASP.NET AJAX link post). Also read my previous post on using ASP.NET AJAX Control Extenders in VS 2008 to learn more about the integrated design-time support that you now get with the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit in VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express.
Lastly, check out the great ASP.NET AJAX videos on the www.asp.net site here and here.
Visual Studio 2008 Web Deployment Project Support
Late last night my team also posted the VS 2008 Web Deployment project download option for VS 2008. Web Deployment projects can be used with either the "Web Site" or "Web Application Project" options built-into VS 2008, and provide a few additional build, packaging and deployment options for you to use. You can read an old tutorial post of mine here to learn more about they work.
This week's VS 2008 Web Deployment Project download supports all of the existing features provided by the VS 2005 web deployment download. It also adds additional support for:
- Easily migrating VS 2005 Web Deployment Projects to VS 2008 Web Deployment Projects
- Replacing output only if web deployment builds succeed
- IIS7 Support
You can learn more about this week's download here and download it directly here. We are calling this week's download the "December CTP" so that we can incorporate feedback on the new features. We are then going to ship the final release on the web next month.
Hope this helps,
Scott
