Perhaps many will be interested in what to expect in the future from ASP.NET AJAX. Fortunately, asp.net developers have shared their plans with us by releasing an
ASP.NET AJAX Roadmap .
From interesting things, we can note a big movement towards client technologies and the introduction of mechanisms for easy manipulation of DOM objects through selectors like $ query (“input [type = text] [value ~ = foo]”). Hopefully, Microsoft will have a good jQuery competitor, maybe not so small, but not less functional and for asp.net native.
It also seems to be promising client controls like tables, treeview and even Rich text editor.
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In general, the impressions from the roadmap are positive. Microsoft's AJAX is evolving, and development plans are to my liking.