title: What is the purpose of the Assemblies node in Web.Config?
body: <p>When creating a new ASP.NET AJAX Web Application in Visual Studio 2005, the default web.config contains the following section (inside the <em>compilation</em> node):</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;assemblies&gt;
      &lt;add assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"/&gt;
  &lt;/assemblies&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Whether or not the <em>assemblies</em> node exists doesn't seem to affect the AJAX functionality.  Update panels, etc work fine regardless of whether or not the reference to System.Web.Extensions is included in Web.Config.</p>
  
  <p>What's the purpose of this section, and can it be safely removed?</p>