Microsoft on Friday began shipping a Release Candidate - the precursor to the general release - of its AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) technology. The company's ASP.Net team shipped the Release Candidate of ASP.Net AJAX 1.0, which enables Web developers to build pages with a rich UI and more efficient client-server communication. The general release of ASP.Net AJAX 1.0 is expected to ship around the end o Microsoft on Friday began shipping a Release Candidate – the precursor to the general release – of its AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) technology. The company’s ASP.Net team shipped the Release Candidate of ASP.Net AJAX 1.0, which enables Web developers to build pages with a rich UI and more efficient client-server communication. The general release of ASP.Net AJAX 1.0 is expected to ship around the end of this year. New features in the Release Candidate include a built-in Visual Studio Web Application Project template for building ASP.Net AJAX applications, said Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie, general manager within the company’s Developer Division, in his blog. Additional globalization support for AJAX applications also is featured, along with new script resource handler features to improve substitution logic, compression and caching. Also featured is dynamic invocation of Web service proxies from JavaScript. ASP.Net AJAX will be part of the core .Net Framework going forward. It also will be part of the upcoming Orcas release of the Visual Studio development platform. The Release Candidate is accessible here. Technology Industry