It has been really exciting to see the advancements that Microsoft has been making in the last year or so. Granted, they still have a long way to go, but for developers, things might be getting better a little sooner than we every could have imagined.
First, we heard that they’re speeding up a release of IE7 instead of making us wait for eternity for Longhorn.
Then, this week we hear that they’re working on an Ajax framework for ASP.NET development. This is something I’ve been wanting forever. I’ve used Ajax on a few projects lately and it’s really made things pretty snazzy. Most of the Ajax libraries have been built on top of Ruby or PHP. Doing something for .NET myself had been a consideration, but where is someone supposed to find that kind of time?
I ran across Ajax.NET, but I’ve yet to have good results with a free .NET utility/library/control (and I’ve used quite a few).
I was wicked stoked to see Scott Guthrie’s post on the Atlas Project and that Microsoft is taking action on what developers are asking for. Sure, they’ve had the functionality for a while, and Outlook Web Access makes generous use of Ajax, but now they’re opening up the framework. I can’t wait.