DevExpress Takes over AJAX Control Toolkit Maintenance

Glendale, California – October 1, 2014 – DevExpress announced today that it is taking over the maintenance of the open-source Ajax Control Toolkit. This toolkit was written by Microsoft in the early days of ASP.NET to help developers create web applications in the days before the jQuery library was popular, before Ajax was baked into ASP.NET, and has been downloaded several million times since then.

"It's an extremely popular toolkit that has unfortunately fallen on hard times," said Julian M Bucknall, Chief Technology Officer at DevExpress. "We learned from it a long time ago and so it's time that we paid our dues to the community by taking it over, fixing the endemic issues it has gained over the years and updating it for the current and future versions of Visual Studio development environment."

"DevExpress stepping in to help maintain the ASP.NET Ajax Control Toolkit is very exciting," said Scott Hunter, Principal Group Program Manager of the Application Platform team at Microsoft. "The entire community of developers who use Ajax Control Toolkit will benefit from the expertise and organization DevExpress will bring to this open project."

Due to the extensive nature of the changes required, DevExpress estimates that an initial corrected release won't be available until early 2015.

About DevExpress

DevExpress offers feature-complete UI controls, enterprise-ready reporting systems, automated web testing tools and business application frameworks. Our technologies help you build your best, see complex software with greater clarity, increase your productivity and create stunning touch-enabled applications for Windows, Web and next generation Mobile
platforms - without limits or compromise.