I spent close to three weeks on the road giving talks at Tech-Ed Europe (Berlin), PDC (Los Angeles), and the Los Angeles Code Camp (Los Angeles). I got to talk about two topics that I am very passionate about: ASP.NET MVC and Ajax. Thanks everyone for coming to all my talks! At PDC, I announced all of the new features of our ASP.NET Ajax Library. In particular, I made five big announcements: ASP.NET Ajax Library Beta Released – You can download the beta from Ajax.CodePlex.com ASP.NET Ajax Library includes the AJAX Control Toolkit –...

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 was released this week and one of the first things that I hope you notice is that it no longer contains the latest version of ASP.NET AJAX. What happened? Where did AJAX go? Just like Sting and The Police, just like Phil Collins and Genesis, just like Greg Page and the Wiggles, AJAX has gone out of band! We are starting a solo career. A Name Change First things first. In previous releases, our Ajax framework was named ASP.NET AJAX. We now have changed the name of the framework to the Microsoft Ajax Library. There are two...

Last night, Scott Guthrie announced that the ASP.net team published a free tool that enables you to improve the performance of your Ajax applications by reducing the size of its JavaScript files. The new tool is named the Microsoft Ajax Minifier. You can read Scott Guthrie’s announcement here: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/10/15/announcing-microsoft-ajax-library-preview-6-and-the-microsoft-ajax-minifier.aspx And you can download and install the free tool from the CodePlex website here: http://aspnet.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=34488 In this blog entry, I explain how you can take advantage of the Microsoft Ajax from the command-line and when you are using Visual Studio. Overview of the Microsoft Ajax Minifier The Microsoft Ajax Minifier was created by Ron Logan (who is clearly...

We just released a new version of the AJAX Control Toolkit today. This new version includes significant bug fixes and two new controls. You can download the latest version – the September 30th release – from the CodePlex website right here: http://ajaxcontroltoolkit.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=33804 Read the following tutorial to learn how to install the AJAX Control Toolkit: http://www.asp.net/learn/Ajax-Control-Toolkit/tutorial-47-cs.aspx In this blog entry, I provide a brief walkthrough of the two new controls included with this release and list the new bug fixes. Seadragon Control The Seadragon control enables you to pan, zoom, and make an image full screen. The control performs all of these fancy image effects using...

Scott Guthrie announced the launch of the Microsoft Ajax CDN on his blog last night. If you have not read his post, I recommend that you read it now to get a general overview of the CDN and how you can take advantage of the CDN to improve the performance of your ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC applications: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/09/15/announcing-the-microsoft-ajax-cdn.aspx In his announcement, Scott describes how both the ASP.NET Ajax and the jQuery libraries are included in the CDN. There is one more set of JavaScript files that we added to the CDN today that Scott did not announce: the jQuery Validation...

The AJAX Control Toolkit is an incredibly popular set of controls that enable you to easily add JavaScript functionality to an ASP.NET application. The AJAX Control Toolkit has consistently been one of the top three most popular downloads from CodePlex since the birth of CodePlex (see http://www.CodePlex.com). Lately, we’ve been thinking hard about methods of improving the quality of the AJAX Control Toolkit controls. We want to improve the quality of the AJAX Control Toolkit controls so that they match the very high standards of quality of the official ASP.NET framework controls such as the GridView and TextBox controls. In discussions...

Hey, I am shifting teams at Microsoft! A little more than a year ago, I started working at Microsoft on the www.ASP.net community team creating ASP.NET MVC content. Over the past year, I’ve been doing things like speaking at a lot of conferences (PDC, Tech-Ed Emea, Tech-Ed India, MIX, ASP.NET Connections), writing a lot of tutorials and recording a lot of videos, and finishing a book. It has been an intense experience. Next week, I am officially joining the ASP.NET team as a feature PM with a focus on ASP.NET AJAX. I’m going to be working on the Microsoft AJAX Framework...

Thank you to everyone who came to my talks at Tech-ed India! It was great meeting so many developers in India (I finally got to meet many people who I have been reading their blogs for years). I’ve had several people request the slides and sample files from the talk so I am posting them here. ASP.NET 4 Talk – The slides and sample files. MVC Talk – The slides. The Contact Manager sample application is located at http://www.ASP.net/mvc/learn. AJAX 4.0 Talk – The slides and sample files.  

I’ll be in India all next week giving 3 talks at Microsoft Tech-ed in Hyderabad. This is my first trip to India. I have no idea what to expect. I’ll be giving the following three talks: Welcome to ASP.NET 4.0 – Developing Next Gen Web Applications Developing MVC Based Web Apps using ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 I get to talk about all of the new innovations coming with the next version of ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET AJAX (some exciting new stuff to talk about there). And, I get to do...

Thanks everyone for the incredible amount of feedback that I got after my two talks at MIX last week -- I'm still receiving emails. I've added links to the video recordings of the talks below: ASP.NET 4.0: What's Next? ASP.NET: Taking AJAX to the Next Level Here are the links to the slides and code samples: ASP.NET 4.0: What's Next? ASP.NET: Taking AJAX to the Next Level Realize that the code from the ASP. NET 4.0 Talk requires Visual Studio 2010 -- so you won't be able to do much with it without Visual Studio 2010 other than take a look at the code in Notepad.