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With Visual Studio 2008 released, I was missing some features in the area of web projects – for example the ability to add AJAX extenders to regular ASP.NET Controls using a simple click on the Control’s “Tasks” icon.

This was possible in Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 using the “ASP.NET Futures CTP (July)” which wasn’t built for Visual Studio 2008 RTM.

Now however, there is the “Microsoft ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview” which re-enables these features – among a myriad of other amazing things, namely:

• ASP.NET MVC (A model-view-controller for ASP.NET 3.5)
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data  (Build code-less, simple, data-driven apps)
• ASP.NET AJAX (as described above)
• ADO.NET Entity Framework (Modeling framework for database schemas)
• ADO.NET Data Services (find, manipulate and deliver data using URIs)
• Silverlight Controls for ASP.NET (two ASP.NET server-side controls to embed Silverlight XAML objects and Media elements into ASP.NET solutions without any scripting)

To fully benefit from the ASP.NET AJAX enhancements in this add-on, you should also get the “AJAX Control Toolkit for the .NET Framework 3.5” unzip it, build the project and add a reference to “…\AjaxControlToolkit\bin\Debug\AjaxControlToolkit.dll” to your Visual Studio 2008 Toolbox / projects.

I recommend reading Scott Guthrie’s excellenct posts on the subject and watching Scott Hanselman’s “ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions - plus MVC How-To Screencast” to get you started.