However, as the Visual Studio team, like most Microsoft teams, was on a 2- to 3-year release cycle, the ASP.NET team could not keep up with the changes in web technologies. Chapter 1 of this book provides a more comprehensive explanation as to how the ASP.NET team is handling this dilemma by providing more frequent out-of-band (OOB) releases of their products. This chapter also discusses the open source initiatives that the ASP.NET team has. In fact, many of the ASP.NET technologies have been already released as true open source. It’s a really exciting time for web development on ASP.NET.