The recently released Ajax Control Toolkit provides support for jQuery and introduces a new jQueryExtender base class, which enables you to create Ajax Control Toolkit controls with jQuery instead of the Microsoft Ajax Library. The Ajax Control Toolkit has been rewritten to support jQuery to enable developers to leverage features such as automatic bundling,
minification, caching, and compression. As of the time of this writing, only ToggleButton control in the Ajax control toolkit has been rewritten to take advantage of the new jQueryExtender base class.
"All of the other controls in the Ajax Control Toolkit are written using the Microsoft Ajax Library. We hope to gradually rewrite these controls as jQuery controls over time," said Stephen Walther, Microsoft Software Legend and Program Manager, ASP.NET.
The advantage of using jQuery with Ajax controls is that there is no need to enclose the code inside <script> tag. Moreover, you need not have to call $create() method. For instance, the ToggleButton control is instantiated with a data-act-togglebuttonextender attribute, which in turn produces clean markup.
According to Stephen, Ajax Control Toolkit controls run on both the server and client, provides rich Visual Studio experience. Moreover, there is no need to work with JavaScript.
The latest release of Ajax Control Toolkit includes an improved documentation which describes the usage of ToolkitScriptManager and examines the new bundling, minification, compression and caching features of the Ajax Control Toolkit.
The Ajax Toolkit also includes an updated Twitter control that takes advantage of the new Twitter API since API v1 is slated to be retired soon.In order to make use of the new Twitter API, you should get a key, access token from Twitter, add the key and token to your web.config file.
