Open-source .NET gets AJAX polish

The open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET development framework is getting some AJAX spit and polish from interface specialist Telerik.

Telerik, which builds re-usable software components and is a partner of Microsoft and Borland, has announced that its RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX now supports Mono.

This brings a suite of controls to the Novell-backed implementation of .NET spanning an AJAX data grid and HTML editor.

As a result, a suite of off-the-shelf, re-usable interface components that have been refined for Windows are now available to developers working on Linux and Unix with Mono. Telerik's components are used by major customers that include NASA, Boeing, Vodafone, and Microsoft itself.

Miguel de Icaza, Mono's lead and also the creator of Gnome, said on his blog that Telerik had helped the Mono team by providing access to their source code, test suite, and their Q/A team to help ensure that the company's "thousands of tests" ran as well on Mono version 2.4 as they do on the official .NET implementation from Microsoft for Windows. Testing has been conducted during the last few months.

Telerik said it was optimistic about the effect its partnership with Novell will have on the industry and the "benefits" it will bring to .NET developers.

Mono's been active for eight years, and was started in response to the then-new .NET from Microsoft as a way to bring the development benefits of that framework to Linux and Unix. ®