I’m not here for the all the real programming info that they are throwing out – in my area the challenge is to know about things just enough so that I can have a reasonable conversation with Technical Managers or developers; that’s the reason I need to know just enough about marketing as well, I have to sit in the middle of multiple teams.
So I’m sitting here in a presentation about Atlas, the development framework that Microsoft is releasing. Now, much is over my head but I am picking up the following:
- the framwork has been developed so that a developer in asp.net does not have to learn too much new stuff to implement
- that it has been set up in such as way that you can incrementally add asynch updates to web pages by moving chunks of code into tag sets called Update Panels, and you can add thes epanels over your page. So it does not need huge re-writes to start implemeneting the richness an dsmoothness that AJAX can bring to the web
- the javascript modules provided in the kit are cross-browser, OS and platform compatible. So you can run this platform on a LAMP server, you do not need ASP.net on the server. The’;ve demonstrated on a MAc/Safari and on Firefox
- To use Atlas without asp.net, you can pull off all the client modules, but wil need to builds out the server side stuff. There was a demo with a php page and a call to people to start working with php and Atlas.
- lots of extenders will be built (and released as source code) to increase the modules and functionality available.
A lot of what they appear to have done is make things simpler. This type of coding has been around for a while – it’s just been difficult, this tries to reduce the need to write the javascript (is that a good thing?).
Links: atlas.asp.net
