New Atlas Build Available for Download with ASP.NET 2.0
The January CTP build of Atlas was made available today and can be downloaded from http://atlas.asp.net. This is a pretty big release of Atlas that has a number of new and improved goodies (I'm planning on hopefully doing some blog posts walking through some samples soon).
In particular, the Atlas team has spent a lot of time enhancing and fleshing out a number of the core scenarios around the new <atlas:updatepanel> server control -- including adding progress message support, error handling, support for Response.Redirects, and the ability to have some controls on a page perform regular full-page post-backs while others cause incremental Ajax updates of content.
The beauty of the <atlas:updatepanel> control is that it enables you to take an existing ASP.NET page with controls and Ajax enable it in under 5 minutes or less (including error handling + progress message UI, etc), without having to write a single line of javascript (note: Atlas also provides a very, very rich client javascript library if you want to use that as well -- but you don't need to write to it at all unless you want to).
I posted a fun task-list sample over Christmas that used the initial <atlas:updatepanel> control in the December CTP drop of Atlas to implement a master/details task list that supported paging, sorting, additions, deletions and in place editing of tasks using Ajax partial page update techniques + exposed the task data using RSS. I was able to implement it in 39 lines of C# code total including all of the data access logic (I never actually had to write a line of Javascript). You might want to check out that to get a sense of how <atlas:updatepanel> works, and how easily you can take advantage of it with existing ASP.NET controls you already have (no need to learn new ones).
Nikhil posted a great blog entry today that summarizes all of the additional features and enhancements to the <atlas:updatepanel> scenarios that were added as part of this new Atlas CTP drop. As you can see, there is now much richer support for error handling and updateprogress UI you can take advantage of as well.
Hope this helps,
Scott
P.S. You might have noticed the irony that the January CTP drop is being made available for download today (February 8th). It does take a little while to get the bits signed and propped onto the download servers, which is why the naming might at first seem a little odd. ;-)