It's finally here - as in just shipped today.

There are lots of existing AJAX frameworks out there, and MS has taken quite a while to finally deploy theirs as a 100% supported product, but I'm convinced it will gain tremendous market-share and become an almost de-facto AJAX framework for oodles and oodles of people.

On the note of why it took so long, something I've been a bit critical about in the past, I had the privilege of attending an ASPInsiders summit in December - and got some great insights into just how many hoops the ASP.NET team has to jump through to make something truly 'support ready'. For smaller shops, full support isn't that big of an issue - as long as devs have full access to the code, they're fine using whatever is available. For bigger companies (i.e. with lots of lawyers and pointy-haired bosses), they need someone to blame if things don't work out - so they typically won't touch 'external' code/components unless it comes with COMPLETE support. (Impatient jerks like me tend to forget things like that at times.)

And on the level of 'confessions', I do a lot of bashing of MS at times. Frankly, that's because some 'wings' of MS deserve it. I make my living with MS products, so I'm bound to be critical when they botch (in my estimation) something. But I've REALLY got to hand it to the ASP.NET team. They really try hard to make things work, and to meet real customer demand. A good case in point is that you can actually download core ASP.NET AJAX components as .zip files. That may seem like a trifle, but almost all source code that you can download from MS comes down bundled as a wretched .msi. MSI is a killer technology, and makes installation painless - I love it. But using it as a way to stuff a EULA in front of devs before they crack open sample code is just lame. Kudos to the ASP.NET team for breaking the mold and giving devs more power/freedom.

And kudos to the ASP.NET team for shipping. I know they've put in tons of cycles on making this framework work - and in making it cleanly extensible in the future.

UPDATE: ScottGu just blogged about the release, along with some of the great offerings involved (full source code, etc.).