ASP.NET AJAX, XQuery reach 1.0

Two important server-development elements have been finalized this week.

ASP.NET AJAX, which is Microsoft’s tooling to support rich Web applications on its ASP.NET application server, reached 1.0 status on Tuesday. ASP.NET is a well-respected app server, and from what I’ve seen, Microsoft has done an excellent job with its AJAX implementation. See my comments from last October about ASP.NET AJAX.

Also yesterday, the W3C formally released its XQuery 1.0 spec, along with XSLT 2.0. XQuery describes a platform-neutral query language that can work across XML data. While there’s a lot of work to be done with XQuery (see my earlier comments), this is a key milestone on that project.