ASP.NET AJAX Script Combining Support
.NET 3.5 SP1 introduces a new <CompositeScript> element on the <asp:ScriptManager> server control, which allows you to declaratively define multiple script references within it. All the script references within the CompositeScript element are combined together on the server and served as a single script to the client, reducing the number of requests to the server and improving page load time for ASP.NET AJAX applications.
The script combining feature supports both path based scripts and assembly resource based scripts, and dynamically serves up the combined scripts using the ScriptResources.axd handler.
This was a huge help to one of my ISV's, so I thought I would share it on my blog.
Here's some quotes from that customer:
"This relates to some of the performance issues we were studying last year. There may be an option to group the individual script components.
This is great... definitely what we need. We have tested with jsmin and compression to reduce the size but this is what was left to remove the latency issue.... which we were going to look at later. Its good to know that this new feature has been added.
You can also delay the down loading of the scripts (after all rendering) to give the illusion of quicker pages. "
- quote from customer