AJAX is the first developer "product" or "technology" where no specs are in the MSDN documentation. Documentation is a essential software feature like security.
ASP.NET AJAX extensions
there is only partial documentation online available. The best you can do are the walkthorughs. Since today the download of the web site as package is available. ( I have looked for it on Friday). Microsoft released last week the source code which is no common way to learn. Also the webcasts are not a efficent way to solve a development problems. All that is still not enough!
ASP.NET Toolkit
Usercontrols have been the success factor for the VB story. Also the AJAX controls should be under full control of a vendor: reliable, documented and must have a roadmap. Microsoft please take over full control! The documentation are samples which can be downloaded. I would pay for it!
ASP.NET futures
Nice idea to have a view on the upcoming things. But e.g. Autocompleteextender, which is essential, have moved from futures to toolkit without the needed documentation or migration path. At the moment I can find NOTHING about XML Script. All my samples from dec ctp breaks. Only info that im found are 3 sample projects.
CTP (community drops) issue
Microsoft ships a lot of public builds of AJAX. This strategy ends up in a lot of public and free documents which are outdated (majority). If you use google and find a sample, you have no guarantee that this working or which build is used. This costs development time. Yes i know cheat sheets, but should be job of microsoft to hand out that info.
In my opinion for professional productivity of ASP.NET AJAX development we need at least following:
- better documentation
- intellisense
- less CTP's
- roadmap (18 month)