So it looks like everything is going according to planned as Scott Guthrie had promised. The MS Ajax Framework has been released into Beta. Based on his blog entry (http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/10/20/ASP.NET-AJAX-Beta-1-Released.aspx), amongst the aftermath of the triple bypass surgery performed, one plus is their performance optimization. A concern from my previous company was the large single JavaScript download.
It looks like they also beefed up the documentation: http://ajax.asp.net/docs/default.aspx. Makes you feel like "gosh, I wish it was there during our development lifecycle". At my previous company, we adopted the MS Ajax Framework in one of the earlier CTPs. In hindsight, our codebase did not always adhere to its intended client-side practices. According to Scott Guthrie (on a Scott Hanselman podcast), the ajax control toolkit is the most commonly used. We went against the grain and wrote a lot of JavaScript instead. Some of it had to do with all the compatibility issues we were facing with Atlas and third party components such as ComponentArt and Dundas Chart In any case, we mostly took advantage of its client-side API, OOP standards and web services tie-in. While there was no shortage of headaches, there is something particularly satisfying about working with pre-release technology to hopefully give a significant boost an organization's flagship product and provide users with a rich feature set. We pushed the limits of the framework and realized the scalability issues with JSON (Dave Johnson's blog entry has a good overview on this: http://blogs.ebusiness-apps.com/dave/?p=43). There were arguments on JavaScript programming practices (implementation preferences - efficient & obscure vs simple), standards for distinguishing private/public functions in a class (whether to make it truly private and keep it in the scope of the class = function) and when it was appropriate to use Sys.UI and when it just caused unecessary overhead. What makes a great experience is when you work in a small team with open-minded people and decide how to build up your JavaScript library. Ahhh, Good Times.
Unfortunately, it looks like there is a problem when you attempt to load up the MS Ajax page. Also, official Atlas traces are gone. Typing http://atlas.asp.net now just redirects you to http://ajax.asp.net.