Not final release but quite close this time. The ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX, formerly known as the Atlas, has been released yesterday, with all the new look and feel. Changes are quite deep and important so all current Atlas pioneers should prepare themselves for a few hours to spend on migration.
The new solution has been spitted to two separated downloads. First, ASP.NET AJAX v1.0 Beta contains all the AJAX core functionality that is the ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions and the Microsoft AJAX Library. That will allow creating AJAX-style applications using server- or client-side development. The Microsoft AJAX Library is also available in a standalone package for development on non-Windows systems. This package contains features such as asynchronous calls, page methods calls, ControlExtender class, Script Managers, bunch of Java Script classes, debug and trace, Timer and UpdatePanel. Note that UpdateProgress control has been moved temporary to ASP.NET AJAX CTP, which is quite significant change, but will return to the core in the final release.
The second package, ASP.NET 2.0 Community Technical Preview (CTP) extends core AJAC functionality with number of features. A full detail, where which feature is located is available on Feature Matrix on ASP.NET AJAX webpage. It's worth to check this out. ASP.NET 2.0 CTP is a preview of unsupported features that may be later included in final release of ASP.NET AJAX, included as part of ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit or even released as sample code.
Both packages together enable all development scenarios supported in the earlier versions but changes require some work to update existing applications. The migration guide describes all the process quite well. I will test it next week so expect some conclusions.
ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit has been also released today, as a part of changes. The new release includes all changes made in ASP.NET AJAX core. Changes are significant as well, especially for extender developers. While typical, ready-to-use extenders didn't change too much, extender model has been redesigned. Properties have been moved to the main Extender class and client side behaviour template has been changed as well. My current cycle on showing validator extender will be upgraded to the new version, so in the next par I will try to describe the differences between the old and the new.
That's al at this time. In next couple of days I will try to write some more on this.