This morning, we just showed Atlas for the first time to the public in Jim Allchin's keynote at PDC 2005. We've been working on Atlas for a few months now, and it's very exciting to be able to have an early preview release in everyone's hands at PDC.

So, how do you get your hands on these Atlas bits? Go check out the Atlas community site at http://atlas.asp.net. Here, you can get download Atlas for use with Whidbey Beta 2. The Atlas preview downloads as a VSI that installs into your Visual Studio Beta 2 release - you get new project items to start building Atlas apps.

We also have some documentation available to help you explore Atlas - including some conceptual docs, the full set of Atlas hands-on labs that PDC attendees are using, and a set of quickstarts to help you learn Atlas. The key to the site, of course, is the feedback we get from you - so we have a set of Atlas forums, and pointers to blogs hosted by team members such as Nikhil, Bertrand, and Jonathan.

Our ultimate goal with the Atlas site is to build a great developer community around Atlas, and get your valuable input to help build the right product. We'll release updates of our community preview on a frequent basis, as well as samples and documentation. I

If you're attending PDC this week, we've got a couple of talks later this week - an overview talk by myself tomorrow at 5, and a custom controls and components talk by Nikhil on Thursday morning. If you didn't get to attend PDC this year, we'll be making the slides and demos from our PDC Atlas talks available on the site in the next few days.

Have fun playing with Atlas! And if you'd like to see us talk more about Atlas on the blogs, let me know.