ASP.NET AJAX Beta 2 was publicly released right before Scott Guthrie's keynote presentation at the ASP.NET Connections conference last night here in Vegas. ASP.NET AJAX is now virtually feature-complete and on track to be fully released by the end of the year.

We had the opportunity to test our Web.UI code with ASP.NET AJAX Beta 2 a few days before its public release, and I am happy to report that our latest public build (2006.2.1477) works well with Beta 2. In fact, we are not aware of any issues related to Beta 2 changes.

We will soon post an update of Web.UI for ASP.NET AJAX that takes advantage of some of the features introduced with Beta 2. While the new localization and globalization features are quite handy, my personal favourite the ability to have multiple instances of the UpdateProgress control on the page. It's great that this feature made it into the initial release of ASP.NET AJAX, as it will definitely help create more sophisticated AJAX UIs.