I guess there’s be a blog post coming up soonish, but for me the big deal is integration of a templating language. We experimented with the MS-written templating plugin that’s now been integrated and it seems pretty good.
Beware of Microsoft's jQuery-tmpl templates, if you care about being able to render your views with reasonable performance. You can benchmark 'em yourself here:
TL, Didn't Benchmark: Two orders of magnitude slower (approx) than other engines. On the iPad, for example, jQuery-tmpl was able to render a small template 181 times in a second, whereas Eco, at the other end of the scale, was able to render the same template 11,549 times.
In JS web apps, the most common speed constraint you'll encounter is how fast you can render views and update the DOM. Imagine trying to render 500 list items ... say, contacts in an address book -- you don't really want that to take 3 seconds on an iPad. If it works for your needs, that's fantastic, but it's nice to be aware of the performance relative to alternatives that accomplish the same goal.
Thanks for the info. For our internal tests our app renders a template a few times a minute with ~500 nodes, but all our users are on Firefox 4 or Chrome latest so no-one’s noticed a problem. If we stard building client-facing apps I’ll definitely look at the alternatives.
The CDN used to use the microsoft.com domain name and has been changed to use the aspnetcdn.com domain name. This change was made to increase performance because when a browser referenced the microsoft.com domain it would send any cookies from that domain across the wire with each request. By renaming to a domain name other than microsoft.com performance can be increased by as much to 25%. Note ajax.microsoft.com will continue to function but ajax.aspnetcdn.com is recommended.
If you want to do that, I recommend starting by watching Paul Irish's "10 Things I Learned from the jQuery Source" [0] and "11 More Things I Learned from the jQuery Source" [1] as he does exactly that.
There's also jQuery Deconstructed [2] to navigate the jQuery source in... an interesting manner.
The most important new features are probably: the rewritten $.ajax [0] which returns a promise [1] in the manner of e.g. Mochikit and the subclassable jQuery object [2]
