The AJAX Control Toolkit v15.1 has been released by DevExpress. It includes several new features and improvements and is available for download from the official website.
As mentioned above, the AJAX Control Toolkit v15.1 includes several new features as mentioned below. If you had worked with the previous versions then you will find it easier to work with the latest release.
Improved Installer
AJAX Control Toolkit v15.1 ships with an improved ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit installer that leverages Visual Studio’s extensibility features. The new installer automatically registers the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit components into the Toolbox of all available Visual Studio versions that you have installed on your system.
Single Assembly
AJAX Control Toolkit v15.1 includes a single assembly that supports all .NET versions later than .NET 3.5. DevExpress has dropped support for .NET Framework 3.5.
The ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit assembly no longer requires AjaxMin, HtmlAgilityPack or WindowsAzure. This means that the toolkit is free from external dependencies.
The ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit has replaced outdated custom resource bundling and minification mechanism with a modern mechanism with the help of ASP.NET Web Optimization framework. The latest release can be easily used with the latest standard Visual Studio web-project templates. Hence, the assembly works with Bootstrap and modern HTML5 browsers.
“We have updated this release’s version number to v15.1 because we wanted a more semantic version number system. So v15.1 means ‘2015 major release 1,” said Mehul Harry, Web Program Manager, DevExpress.
DevExpress has worked hard to clean and add a new structure to the entire source code tree. The latest release of ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit also removed unused and outdated code.
The ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit v15.1 has removed buggy support for Windows Azure and the so-called jQueryzation of the toolkit. The release also includes numerous bug fixes.
Mehul has published a detailed article which examines the steps required to upgrade to v15.1 release from previous versions.
