Ok, I know it might sound pretty damn geeky to some for me to talk about a set of web controls as being "bad ass", but they are. I'm talking about the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit.  The toolkit  is a joint project between the ASP.NET development community and Microsoft.

The tookit has 34 controls that'll help build a kick ass ASP.NET web app. Some of my favorites of the bunch include the NoBot control (its a CAPTCHA w/o a CAPTCHA), the FilteredTextBox, and the DragPanel control. I've already started implementing some of these controls at my full time development job, as well as on some of my own sites. If you havent checked it out, and you are doing any kind of .NET development, I suggest you do.

There are two seperate downloads. One for the .NET frameworks 1.x and 2.0, as well as a seperate download for those already running .NET 3.5 Beta 2 with VS 2008 Beta 2. You'll also want to check out the CodePlex site for the tool kit to meet the development team, and for pubic forum access. Happy coding!

web development asp.net, ajax