According to this article over on Builder.com.au today, Microsfot is trying to get in on the AJAX act with a few little technologies of their own.

The company is building software, code-named Atlas, that provides developers with tools designed to ease creation of AJAX-style applications. An early version of the software will be made available to developers at the company's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles in September.

Microsoft's Atlas is a "Web client framework" designed to make the job of building AJAX-style applications simpler, said Charles Fitzgerald, the company's general manager for platform technologies. To run applications built using Atlas, users will need to download a Web browser add-on.

So, it's more than just AJAX (which just requires a browser to use), and, undoubtedly, has all sorts of lovely bugs...er, features that will further web development as we know it. The Atlas software is described as a "downloadable piece of JavaScript code" that gives developers more structure and services like an object model and debugging features...oh, and did we mention that:

...developers can use the Atlas software through Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 development tools and the Web development framework ASP.Net 2.0