It's the second time in just a few days that I see blog comments attack Atlas on its compatibility layer. I've tried to explain a few days ago why we made this design choice but I think it deserves an even more detailed explanation... There are basically three ways you can make a library cross-browser. You can detect capabilities every time you need them. If you do that, all new code must take all browsers into account. Adding a new browser means touching all of the code base. You can write an abstraction layer that creates another API that abstracts the concrete APIs of each browser. This is no more standard than the other two ways as you're really introducing a new proprietary API on top of the existing standard and proprietary ones. Furthermore...

I love that. Kwang Suh sent me this new control he built a few days ago. From his own words: "I saw your accordian example and used it as the basis for a client side Atlas tabstrip control. It even works with Firefox. I don't really have anywhere to post this so I thought that maybe you could have some use for it. Feel free to do what you want with it. What was amazing is that it took me about 3 hours to create it. As with your accordian control, there is a complete separation between markup and style. You can use CSS to format the tabs any way you want." I think this is a great tribute to what Atlas enables in terms of widget creation. So here's how you use the new tabStrip: < div id = "productTabset" > < ul > < li > Tab 1...

To this day I don't think we talk about the localization story in ASP.NET 2.0 enough -- the built in framework really makes it simple to produce a multi-lingual site, the type of thing that would take TONS of code and pain before. In October we released an article that discusses the system in depth -- we updated it today to be inline with RTM and have 3 supplemental papers in the pipeline to continue teaching folks about localization. If you care about localization at all this is a must read -- Expect 1 article every 3-4 weeks on this topic from us, i'll keep you up to date here. Read the article at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnvs05/html/asp2local.asp Comments? Let me know! Read More...

Here . Okay, yeah, it took a little longer than I'd hoped but we made some improvements in the meantime. Check out all the details on the Atlas website , and we've created a forum for the toolkit as well. The controls in the toolkit are basically preview quality. They work at basic scenarios and we'll be releasing refreshes to deal with issues as we find them. But what's more important to me is that they'll hopefully give you examples to start writing controls of your own. The toolkit includes full source for all of the controls, plus the sample website that demonstrates them. The source is licensed under the Microsoft Permissive License which allows you to modify and reuse the code as you see fit. The toolkit also includes a VSI that sets up...

Shawn and his team just released a set of Atlas controls that you might want to check out. It contains some useful controls and extenders such as TextBoxWatermark or ToggleButton (I really like how this one is implemented because it's really using an HTML checkbox despite appearances which is the right semantics and makes it really transparent to use). The controls come with full source code that the license enables you to modify and use as you wish. http://atlas.asp.net/default.aspx?tabid=47&subtabid=477 Live examples are available so that you can check how the controls really work before you decide to use them. The package also contains a toolkit that facilitates the creation of Atlas controls and extenders with some helper classes and...

The cat is out of the bag - I am indeed working on a Blog Starter Kit, and this site is running an early prototype of it. The goal of this Starter Kit is to provide a basic, easy-to-use blog that anyone can pick up and use for their individual site, or customize using Visual Web Developer and ASP.NET. The kit will include the following built-in functionality: Read More...

Microsoft does not enjoy the best reputation when it comes to respecting standards. So when seeing that Atlas has a compatibility layer that extends Firefox and Safari APIs to implement IE-isms, some have seen it as an attempt to discard the standard. The reason why Atlas extends Firefox and Safari to implement the IE APIs and not the other way around is in fact purely technical. Firefox and in a lesser extent Safari allow the extension of HTML element prototypes whereas IE does not. Standards have nothing to do with this decision. There is a need to have a consistent API cross-browser to avoid having the rest of the libraries checking for the existence of an API and branching the code all the time. For example, instead of constantly doing if...

For the past few months, I've been primarily working on a new feature called Web Application Projects. This was incredibly challenging and took way more of my time than I realized it would but it also quite exciting to work on. So, I'm incredibly happy to finally announce that it is availible for download on msdn. Web Application Projects is a feature we started working on immediately after we finished shipping Visual Studio 2005. While the "website model" is great for new projects, there were a lot of challenges for migrating Visual Studio 2003 web projects to VS05. We also lost a few features between 03 and 05 such as being able to add class files where the logically fit in the site (ie in parallel with pages that depended...

For the past few months, I've been primarily working on a new feature called Web Application Projects. This was incredibly challenging and took way more of my time than I realized it would but it also quite exciting to work on. So, I'm incredibly happy to finally announce that it is availible for download on msdn. Web Application Projects is a feature we started working on immediately after we finished shipping Visual Studio 2005. While the "website model" is great for new projects, there were a lot of challenges for migrating Visual Studio 2003 web projects to VS05. We also lost a few features between 03 and 05 such as being able to add class files where the logically fit in the site (ie in parallel with pages that depended on them). We solved...

One question I see constantly on the forums is: How do I get a Masterpage to load Content1 from one page but Content2 from another page or How do I get Content2 to reload when I click a button in Content1 without reloading the entire page. The root of the question is often a misunderstanding of the concept of a Masterpage and confusing it with frames. Masterpages are a way of templating a site. By this I mean defining a look and feel for the overall site and proving a central point for common code while allowing individual pages to modify their specific content. This is not the same thing as a frame although frames are sometimes used this way. Instead, frames are a way of collaging multiple arbitrary pages together in a single browser. Frames...