Microsoft  ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 RC has just been released to the Web. New features include additional globalization support, dynamic invocation of web service proxies, and substitution logic, compression and caching support for the Script Resource handler. Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX is a free framework for quickly creating a new generation of more efficient, more interactive and highly-personalized Web experiences that work across all the most popular browsers.

The RC features the following improvements over the Beta 2 release, including:

* Parsing support in the client for Globalization.
* Dynamic invocation of web service proxies, and substitution logic, compression and caching support for the Script Resource handler.
* Changes to ASP.NET AJAX namespaces and assemblies to ensure compatibility between ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 and ASP.NET AJAX in the .NET Framework release code-named “Orcas” for user-developed applications.

The Control Toolkit has been updated for the ASP.NET AJAX RC release. In addition to taking advantage of the new ASP.NET AJAX preview features, this release includes three great new controls - DropDown, MutuallyExlcusiveCheckBox, ValidatorCallout.  

The ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Futures December CTP is also available for download. The AJAX Futures December CTP is a preview of features in development that are being evaluated for a future release with ASP.NET AJAX, for the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, or for release as sample code. The AJAX Futures Dec CTP complements ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 RC by providing additional features that work alongside the ASP.NET AJAX core. Together, these releases enable development scenarios supported in the earlier ASP.NET AJAX CTP releases, and include newly-added functionality.

With ASP.NET AJAX, developers can quickly create pages with rich, responsive UI and more efficient client-server communication by simply adding a few server controls to their pages. This new Web development technology from Microsoft integrates cross-browser client script libraries with the ASP.NET 2.0 development framework. ASP.NET AJAX provides developers building client-based Web experiences with a familiar development process and programming model that they already know from using server-side ASP.NET development. Because ASP.NET AJAX is integrated with ASP.NET, developers have full access to the built-in ASP.NET 2.0 application services and the entire .NET Framework.