Announcing Microsoft Ajax Library (Preview 6) and the Microsoft Ajax Minifier

The ASP.NET team have 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. 15-10-2009’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.

For more information about this release, see:
http://aspnet.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=34488