What's the point of ASP.net AJAX in ASP.net MVC?

Question

So ASP.net MVC by default ships with both JQuery and ASP.net Ajax. While the use cases of JQuery are obvious and plenty, I just wonder what the point of ASP.net Ajax is? If I just have my Controller Actions return JSON, I don't need it? Also, any "old" ASP.net controls only work if you use the Webforms view Engine (I think I want to use another one, but that's not the point).

What has ASP.net Ajax to offer in an MVC Environment?

Answer 1

Familiarity for those who are used to using the ASP.NET AJAX.

Answer 2

ASP.NET AJAX is a bit different from JQuery it is sort of a large library of stuff and allows you to use similarly named APIs as you would in typical .NET programming. You have a bit more string functions and so forth. That being said, I typically bypass ASP.NET AJAX altogether and find most of what I need in JQuery and other smaller libraries. ASP.NET AJAX is a bit top heavy for my tastes but it does have its uses.