Q&A: Which files are hosted on the Microsoft Ajax Content Delivery Network?

I received a direct email today asking about Microsoft's Content Delivery Network or CDN, as opposed to Google's. A fellow developer from South America wanted to know where he could find a list of files hosted on Microsoft's CDN can be found.

The answer: the latest, up-to-date list can be found here.

Now, a little elaboration: instead of using self-hosted JavaScript files on your site, you might want to consider using a global content delivery network. These CDNs are cached around the world, and thus usually faster for global users. Similarly, a public CDN file might already be cached by the user's browser *before* he or she visits your site, again improving performance of your site.

Of course, there are drawbacks as well, but oftentimes, these are much smaller than the benefits. Thus, a CDN based delivery of scripts sounds like a good idea.

Now then, which files can you find from Microsoft CDN? Shortly put, Microsoft's own Ajax scripts, but also plenty of JavaScript libraries like jQuery, jQuery UI and so on. Thus, if you need jQuery libraries on your ASP.NET web applications, feel free to use those hosted on aspnetcdn.com.

Note that recently, the site "ajax.microsoft.com" was renamed to "ajax.aspnetcdn.com" for performance reasons (cookie transfer is smaller when using the new URL).

Happy hacking!