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:
- It is the start of what is going to be a great control toolkit of 50-100 controls built for Atlas and ASP.NET
- 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
- 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