MS ASP.NET Ajax Beta has been released. I’ll provide a few links from Scott Guthrie’s blog below for the detailed information, but here is the gist of the new release:

The scope of the release is narrower than the previous CTP, as there are only a few key components in the toolkit now (most notably the Update Panel). But we see great things like more browser support (opera and safari) better debugging, and optimized JS files (no longer just one gigantic file that the client has to download).

Unfortunately we are still not able to redistribute the core DLL.

Resources:

• Scott Guthrie's Release Announcement
• Scott Guthrie's Tips and Tricks (Beta sample walkthrough)