Atlas July CTP and the Latest Atlas Control Toolkit

16 Comments

• Hi, I just want to say, nice work. Atlas is great and the way you guys roll out the a new version almost every month is great also.
  I wanted to add that you should show your appreciation to non-Microsoft contributors by giving premium MSDN subscription or Professional VS 2005, so that more people are inclined to work on these tools and share the code.
  
  just my 2 cents.
  

• Excellent. I still hope to see a masked textbox in the control kit... :)
  

• nice work scott,
  I intend to use Atlas controls in my new web project which is a great community site.
  

• Hi Scott,
  
  You have some information on some control that has MASKEDIT.
  
  tks
  
  Ramon Durães
  

• Scott, where can we email you to get a copy of the CSS and image files from your Atlas To-Do List demo? Thanks!
  

• Hi Mark,
  
  If you send me email (scottgu@microsoft.com) I can send you the CSS and Image files from my other Atlas video.
  
  Thanks,
  
  Scott
  

• Scott,
  
  How can we send our controls to the Atlas team?
  Cheers
  Al
  

• Hi Albert,
  
  If you want to send me email I can loop you in with Shawn Burke who runs the Atlas Control Toolkit project.
  
  thx!
  
  Scott
  

• Hi Luis, I was away on vacation from 11:30am on Sunday until Monday evening without access to a computer, which is why your comment wasn't published until I returned. To answer some of your questions above (and in your blog post, which has comments disabled so I couldn't post these there):
  1) The Atlas July CTP contains a number of tactical bug fixes, but doesn't include new features.
  It also doesn't include fixes for every bug reported. The reason for this is that we are in the process of finishing a pretty major re-architecture of a few internal pieces of Atlas. This doesn't change the external programming model for Atlas, but does change the factoring of the Atlas libraries (making them smaller and faster), and adds more robust error handling throughout the system (which is goodness).
  This architectural work is being done within a separate source tree fork, and will form the basis for future CTP releases. Bug fixes will be rolled into this new source tree once the architectural work is complete. This work will provide a lot of stability + performance + feature gains -- but it wasn't quite ready for the July release (which is why it wasn't shipped then). We are working hard on getting this out as soon as possible though. Once this is done you'll see a bunch of new bug fixes show-up (since 95% of the Atlas team's work the last 2.5 months has been on this fork).
  2) The Atlas Control Toolkit team is actually a separate team from the core Atlas team. In fact, more than half of the Toolkit developers are now non-Microsoft employees. This is one of the reason why that download keeps making feature progress while the core Atlas download stabilizes.
  3) Atlas supports both a server-side and a client-side Ajax model. In general we find some developers prefer one over the other. One of the really powerful things about Atlas as an Ajax framework is that it has rich support for both -- and allows developers to mix and match between the two depending on their specific page/app scenarios.
  Hope this helps,
  Scott
  

• Hi Scott,
  Excellent tutorials.
  2 questions:
  A) The samples shown use a button action to initiate a display change. I am interested in "binding" the display to some sort of "database" such that when the value changes, the display gets updated. In this scenario the server side would initiate the update. Is this possible, are there examples?
  
  B) Are there workshops / demonstrations / conventions / courses planned throughout North America for ATLAS? If so, where and when, else where can I find such a schedule?
  Thanks,
  Boyd
  

• Hello Scott,
  
  I've downloaded the new Atlas July CTP and the new Atlas Control Toolkit. I'm developing an AtlasWebSite in VB.Net. When I'm using the FilteredTextBox in a DetailsView in InsertMode it works all fine. Very great, this control! But using this FilteredTextBox in a GridView I get following error messagebox when clicking on "edit" button: "Unknown error."
  
  What could I do to solve this problem?
  
  Thank you very much.
  
  Regards
  Paul
  

• It's great that the Toolkit is collaborative with the .NET community. Could I put a call out for a decent Dropdown Calendar control?!? Maybe I'll have to contribute myself :)
  

• Hi Scott,
  
  One of the techniques often used to get around the browser HTTP connection limit of 2 concurrent connections is to use multiple subdomains:
  
  a.mydomain.com
  b.mydomain.com
  c.mydomain.com
  
  Now we can have 6 connections back to the server.
  
  This is particularly important for AJAX apps doing a lot of chatty stuff, which quite frankly the current HTTP standard was not written considering this usage.
  
  Some of the new controls, such as the AtlasControlToolkit DynamicPopulate control do allow you to hit the server multiple times concurrently (unlike most of the controls which are limited due to the ASP.NET page lifecycle requirement of synchronous request to preserve viewstate, etc).
  
  I thought I might be able to do what I describe above using the DynamicPopulate control and specifying the full URL (including different subdomains) via the ServicePath attribute.
  
  However it appears that when the URL specified is different that the exact URL the user used to browse to the site, an error occurs. Note this is not a web server level error, so must be something wrong with either Atlas networking stack or AtlasControlToolkit?
  
  Please pass this onto the Atlas team as they should consider this when building Atlas.
  
  Thanks
  
  David
  

• Was wondering when you guys are targeting a stable production version? We are interested in using Atlas in production in 6 months time and we would like to assuage the concerns of using a CTP product.
  
  Regards,
  Adam
  

• Hi Adam,
  
  We are going to be publishing a formal roadmap in a few months. Having a formal, supported, 1.0 release is something we are looking to have in the timeframe you are after.
  
  Hope this helps,
  
  Scott
  

• Hi David,
  
  I chatted with some folks on the Atlas team, and they mentioned that there is a [WebOperation] attribute that you can add to indicate whether you can support cross domain scripting requests (in other words - go to multiple sub-site domains):
  
  [WebOperation(true /*getVerbEnabled*/, ResponseFormatMode.Json, true /*safeForCrossDomain*/)]
  
  Let me know if this makes sense, and if not I can loop you in with folks from the team.
  
  Thanks,
  
  Scott