There’s Ajax and there’s Ajax. There is Ajax in the Java world where it’s no-holds-barrred, Katy-bar-the-door, and find-yourself-a-framework-or-die. Then there is Ajax in the .NET world where Microsoft created its own Ajax framework which is offered to you  as part of the company’s other Web development offerings.  

However, Microsoft’s Ajax framework is not the sole Ajax framework available to .NET developers. And at least one blogger thought it was worthwhile to query the Web audience to see how .NET Ajax framworks stacked up.

Italian Simone Chiaretta, .NET developer and Subtext core member, was spurred in his quest by the recent Richard Monson-Haefel Ajaxian survey on Ajax framework use, but wanted to see what things looked like for .NET. Chiaretta found —  lo-and- behold  – that Microsoft’s ASP.NET Ajax was tops by far among responders.He writes:

… among the 95% of the .NET developers that said they are using some flavor of Ajax either in production, development or prototype, the most-used Ajax toolkit is ASP.NET Ajax, with 73,7%, followed by the Ajax Control Toolkit which is used by almost half of the .NET developer that are using Ajax.

Despite, Microsoft’s predominance, there is percolating use of other Ajax frameworks amid the .NET crew. Interestingly, among ASP.NET users cited in Monson-Haefel’s survey, ASP.NET Ajax use is represented by 36.3% of responders, and is in a statistical dead heat with Prototype and jQuery open-source alternatives. Writes Burton Group’s Monson-Haefel:

What is interesting about the Ajax market is that it’s more diversified in 2007 than it was in 2005 - the number of toolkits keep growing and jostling position in terms of usage.

Check out the .NET Ajax Survey, the Monson-Haefel Ajax survey, and filter of Monson-Haefel’s data.

Microsoft is taking this season of giving thing pretty seriously.

First there was Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5. Then there was ParallelFX, an update to the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit and a toolset for programming Silverlight 1.1 — oops, we mean Silverlight 2.0 — in Visual Studio 2008.

The latest contribution is the ASP.NET 3.5 Extension CTP. This, as Scott Guthrie explains, includes a bunch of stuff. There’s better history support for ASP.NET AJAX, tools for speedier development of data-driven Web sites and support for Silverlight.

Two things in particular jump out.

One is the ASP.NET MVC, or Model View Controller. This is a much ballyhooed framework for dividing the components of a Web application into models (which maintain state), views (which display UI) and controllers (which handle end user interactions). As Guthrie puts it in his introduction to the MVC, “Maintaining a clean separation of concerns makes the testing of applications much easier, since the contract between different application components are more clearly defined and articulated.”

The other is ADO.NET Data Services, previously known as Astoria and intricately linked to the forthcoming ADO.NET Entity Framework. Astoria’s appeal is its ability to take relational data and make it a service that can be consumed by client applications in networks and across the Internet. More information about this release can be found in our story, ADO.NET Entity Framework Beta 3 ships; ups LINQ-to-SQL performance.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

Lotta folks have been bringing up the Rich Text Editor, a control written in ASP.NET and JavaScript that has been posted on CodePlex, Microsoft’s code-sharing site.

Kannan Sundararajan wrote the control, but Kirti Deshpande, of Microsoft’s ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit group, is the one who introduced it to the wide world , thanks to a blog entry called Rich Text Editor is here. The features about which he writes include Clipboard support, a context-sensitive toolbar, the ability to format text as code blocks and, crucially, emoticons.

The control was written under the MS-PL license, which is a public license. Rather than summarize the legalese, we’ll just link to the text of the MS-PL license and let you guys exercise your brains a bit.