Atlas Control Toolkit Refresh Now Available (adds Safari support + 4 new controls)

I blogged about the Atlas Control Toolkit three weeks ago when it first shipped.  There are three big reasons I find it exciting:

  1. It is the start of what is going to be a great control toolkit of 50-100 controls built for Atlas and ASP.NET
  2. All source code for the controls is shipped free with a reusable modification license.  This makes it really easy to learn how to build new Atlas enabled controls
  3. We are going to use a collaborative, open source model with it and allow community checkins and code contributions

This past Friday the team delivered an update to the Toolkit.  This release incorporates a bunch of community feature feedback, fixes a lot of bugs, adds support for the Safari browser, and introduces another 4 new Atlas-enabled controls to the 9 introduced with the first release (click on the links below to see online demos of the 4 new controls):

  • AlwaysVisibleControl: Docks any panel to the browser edge so it remains visible all the time.
  • ModalPopup: Shows styled modal UI without using HTML dialogs.
  • DropShadow: Adds attractive drop shadows to any control on the page.
  • RoundedCorners: Rounds the corners of any control for a clean, professional look.

You can download the Atlas Control Toolkit and run the demos online here.  David (one of the devs on the team) also blogged about the release here.  The dedicated Atlas Control Toolkit forum can then be visited here.  Feel free to post questions and suggestions there -- the Atlas Control Toolkit team is super responsive and would love to hear feedback.

Telerik and ComponentArt Support for Atlas

This past week two very popular commercial ASP.NET control vendors -- Telerik and ComponentArt -- also announced Atlas support with their control packages.  You can read more about their announcements here:

This is great news, and means that you'll be able to easily use their controls within Atlas enabled pages.  Going forward, it also means that developers will be able to choose from a very rich variety of pre-built controls when building rich web applications -- some commercial and some open-source.  The larger and better the control library is, and the richer choices we have, the easier it will be for all of us to build cool Ajax apps. :-)

Hope this helps,

Scott

30 Comments

  • What in the world have dropshadow and roundedcorners to do with Atlas ?

  • Asterix -- they provide a convenient way to add richer UI to a site. Several other Ajax frameworks provide them as behaviors as well.



    They also provide good samples that show how to modify the look/feel of an existing control using the extender pattern.



    Hope this helps,



    Scott

  • Cool new stuff Scott.



    I specially like the ModalPopup :)



    regards

  • Love ModalPopUp!!!!



    Awesome work Guys!!!



    Simply Awesome :)

  • Excelent controls :)

  • The BEST part about Atlas is the effort you guys have put in to make it cross-browser. Scott - you have no idea how much that helps us in our jobs out in the field.



    For instance, the ModalDialog works in firefox, I remember going through hell to make IE and Firefox work consistently.

  • Using position:fixed for the Always Visible control would be the better approach (at least for Firefox)

  • Thanks scott,



    my brain is overloading with all the updates lately. I don't seem to have time to test all the new features

  • This is excellent, brilliant controls that make asp.net apps looks great.



    Great work.

    This framework is as important as the .net 2.0 framework in terms of web development.

  • Great work on these controls, but as far as I can tell, none of these controls do any async operations against the server.

    Will it be possible to create reusable Atlas controls that perform calls to the server?

  • Just a quick note, ModalPopup doesn't work in Opera 8.5



    I'm not too bothered, not my primary browser... just letting you know



    I was surprised it worked in Firefox though - good job!



    In IE6.0.2900 I'm experiencing graphical lag :(

  • Asterix , I think the biggest mistake I see going on right now is this view that 'Atlas = ajax'. Whereas I see Atlas as a client side framework - much more than 'just an update panel'.



    It's good to see this work - I hope someone codes up a good masked input box with validation for dates, phone numbers, etc... ;)

  • The modal popup is great!! by far in my opinion the most usable control in the toolkit to date...great work.



    I have a few things to say though, the drop shadows functionality is great BUT the shadow itself doesn't look that good, e.g. small things like the pixelated rounded corners (something which is easy to do in css anyway) and the same issue goes for the rounded corners control.

  • cool stuff, ModelPopup is good! will be useful for my "HoveItemPanel" ;)



    Thanks dude!

  • Hi Einar,



    Controls like the CascadingDropDownList control do async callbacks to the server to grab data (for example: to get the dependencies when one drop-downlist changes).



    All the controls are also designed to work well with the <atlas:updatepanel> to allow async callbacks and refreshes of the page.



    Hope this helps,



    Scott

  • Hi Scott,



    I think this initiative terrific, but I have to warn you here that describing this as an "open source model" without using an actual open source license is going to get some people confused -- I'd hate for the goodness of this to get swept up in the semantics, but there are lots of developers who will get testy if you apply the adjective "open source" to code that isn't actually provided under an open source license.

  • I agree with the remarks on the drop shadow and rounded borders controls: cool controls, but currently they look quite ugly. We're used to neatly anti-aliassed corners for quite a while now! And the corners look a little too oval-shaped to me; I'd prefer them to be perfectly round.

  • Nice controls... keep it up

    I also like to see a tabstrip control (as included in atlas site) in future version of atlas toolkit.



    Suggestion : Can you include the Browser ( along with version) that supports the current toolkit in the release notes. It will help us a lot as we dont need to check toolkit in the diffrent browser version.

  • Is there a dev. roadmap. or something?

  • Hello Scott!



    Is there any way to make it possible for the user to temporarily pin an AlwaysVisibleControl to the page?



    I have an AlwaysVisible control that is also a drop zone filled with draggable items. The problem is that at first the control's height is bigger than the browser screen. Is makes it impossible to get the items from the bottom because while scrolling down the page gets longer and longer.



    I'd greatly appreciate any suggestions.

  • Don't get me wrong, I like Atlas and the toolkit. I'd just wish they would spend some on something else than making controls which you can much easier do with CSS.

  • Hi Rohit,

    Atlas is supported by all major browsers.

  • Hi Pieter,



    Atlas does definitely support Master Pages. Can you send me the problem you were having before again for me to look at?



    Thanks,



    Scott

  • Hi, I am creating a tab strip with Image buttons.  Is there any way i can highlight the image button, whenever it is clicked using the Atlas Framework. I am using these buttons to display views in a multiview using masterpages. Thanks Girish

  • Hi Girish,

    Yep -- you should be able to-do this with Atlas. If you ask in the Atlas Control Toolkit forum they should be able to help.

    Thanks,

    Scott

  • The Modalpopup looks nice, but a user can TAB into the controls/HyperLinks on the backroup and hit the "enter" key...so this ModalPopup prevent users clicking the links on the background ONLY. NOT GOOD ENOUGH

  • Which one is better
    Component Art
    Telerik
    or
    Infragistics?

    Cheers
    Al

  • Hi.

    thanks to atlas team!
    I faced to a problem in using ModalPopupExtender for displaying UpdateProgress, all things works truly until the server response received, modal does not hide automatically (and i can not hide it by my program) then an error will be created.

    May this problem from my program or is a known problem?

    best wishes,

  • Hi Hassan,

    Can you post this issue in the Atlas Control Toolkit forum: http://forums.asp.net/1022/ShowForum.aspx

    The Atlas Control Toolkit team monitors this forum pretty aggresively and should be able to help you with it.

    Thanks,

    Scott

  • Great work ASP.Net team! These controls are proving to be very usefult to our team.

    Some feedback on the ModalPopup control - we are seeing problems when using this control in Safari on our Macs. The popup displays for a second or two, then the page posts back and the popup disappears.

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