ASP.NET AJAX--Two weeks later

I spent the past ten days working on Beta 1 of ASP.NET AJAX Extensions. (OK, I also played a bit of tennis but that's another--and sad--story ...) 

I'm just curious to see what's coming out with Beta 2 of ASP.NET AJAX Extensions.  

I'll nimbly bypass the side effects of the breaking changes and cuts in Beta 1 vs. July CTP. Today, I can say that most of the troubles and frustration I encountered along the way was due to lack of knowledge and understanding of the new behavior of old things. Actually, porting old code to Beta 1, aside from dropped features, was a matter of a few hours. The Beta 1 is not more bugged or unstable than any other Beta version. Quality is certainly not the point here. And this is different from what I posted earlier.

My Atlas book is stillborn and was pulped as an old book right off the press without even seeing the shape of a bookshelf. I'll work on a new version starting next week.

So my position regarding Beta 1 is somehow changed after a few days of work with it. In addition to lack of knowledge, objectively certain features have been implemented according to a philosophy different from the one that seemed emerge out of previous CTPs. I complained about the product being unstable; I have to admit that there was much of personal disappointment with that as well as a lot of frustration for undocumented features.

One good thing about Beta 1 and successive
The framework contains EXACTLY what people need at this time and stage. Updatable panels easy, really easy to integrate with existing applications. The possibility of making remote procedure calls, though with some care. These features work great.

One bad thing about Beta 1 (but not necessarily successive builds)
The return of JavaScript and the elimination of neat programming features (from ErrorTemplate to just a bit of XML Script). It seems to me (repeat, me) that the team opted for the solution that required less coding on their own or, maybe more likely, for the solution that can give the maximum of flexibility to developers. Either way, there's the bold return of JavaScript. Not necessarily a bad thing.

To continue in another post ...