As you may have heard from Scott Guthrie or Scott Hanselman, Microsoft announced that it will make jQuery part of the official dev platform. JQuery will come with Visual Studio in the long term, and in the short term it'll ship with ASP.NET MVC. Microsoft will also ship a version of Visual Studio which includes Intellisense.

jQuery is a lightweight open source JavaScript library (only 15kb in size) that in a relatively short span of time has become one of the most popular libraries on the web. You can read John Resig's (jQuery Team) post about this big announcement.

A big part of the appeal of jQuery is that it allows you to elegantly (and efficiently) find and manipulate HTML elements with minimum lines of code.  jQuery supports this via a nice "selector" API that allows developers to query for HTML elements, and then apply "commands" to them.  One of the characteristics of jQuery commands is that they can be "chained" together - so that the result of one command can feed into another.  jQuery also includes a built-in set of animation APIs that can be used as commands.  The combination allows you to do some really cool things with only a few keystrokes.

Microsoft has released a new version of the AJAX Control Toolkit - Version 3.5.20820.

The 2008-08-20 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit targets the official release of .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1.

AjaxControlToolkit-Framework3.5SP1.zip is the full release package with complete source code to all controls, the test framework, VSI, and more.
AjaxControlToolkit-Framework3.5SP1-NoSource.zip contains only the sample web site and VSI and is for people who don't need or want the source code for the controls.

To start using the Toolkit in your own web sites, please follow the instructions on the Setup Walkthrough.

To start building your own extenders, launch the VSI installers on your machine. This will install new Visual Studio templates that contain everything you need to build extenders.

To get started with source code, simply load the "AjaxControlToolkit.sln" solution in Visual Studio 2005, and run the solution. This will launch the web site and allow you to experiment with the different controls. Also included in the solution is the source code for all the controls.

Please see the sample website release notes for more details.

Microsoft has released the first preview of the new AJAX features in ASP.NET. These new features are a step in the right direction of the new ASP.NET AJAX Roadmap that was released.

This release contains a preview version of the following features:

• Client-side template rendering
• Declarative instantiation of behaviors and controls
• DataView control
• Markup extensions
• Bindings
   

There is a new SharePoint video from the Ted Pattison Group on the Microsoft Downloads. The video gives a real world example of how to build web parts for SharePoint as user controls that utilize AJAX.

Overview:

Learn about building Office SharePoint Server Web Parts with user controls and AJAX. Walk through a real-world example of separating your UI from your code-behind, using user controls to create input panels. Also, learn about using the AJAX update panel.

You can download and watch the video, by clicking here.