We are proud to announce a preview release of Grasshopper with AJAX Extensions support.

This release contains an implementation of System.Web.Extensions, and a sample containing the AJAX Control Toolkit together with its sample web site, all running on Tomcat.

For more information about AJAX Extensions see http://www.asp.net/ajax.

It is worth pointing out that the entire development of this feature is completely open source:

• The System.Web.Extensions implementation was contributed to Mono and is available at
  svn://anonsvn.mono-project.com/source/trunk/mcs/class/System.Web.Extensions
• The Microsoft AJAX Library is based on the Microsoft implementation that was released under the MS-PL
• Also the AJAX Control Toolkit, together with its sample are also available for download on CodePlex under the MS-PL

Come and get it from http://dev.mainsoft.com

A few technical notes worth mentioning:

1. We are currently using the debug version of the Microsoft AJAX Library. This has some performance implications due to the size of the JavaScript files and other differences compared to the optimized JavaScript.
2. We have invested some energy in different performance optimizations by preserving the rendering flow without any difference between AJAX and non-AJAX requests. Same for JSON de/serialization (we avoid creating an intermediate dictionary and perform single pass de/serialization).
3. Porting the AJAX Control Toolkit succeeded without any runtime source code changes. We did need to disable the designer code that is not supported in Grasshopper.

We are interested in feedback. Please give this preview a test drive and let us know what you think. You can ask technical questions, report bugs, or just let us know what you think and what other features you would like to see in the next Grasshopper release by posting in the Grasshopper developer forums at http://dev.mainsoft.com/default.aspx?tabid=27&view=topics&forumid=19

Noam

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2007 at 6:56 am and is filed under Bits And Pieces, Under Construction. You can subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog and you can also follow any comments to this specific entry through the comment RSS feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.