New MS Atlas CTP, Tool Kit Aid Web Developers

Microsoft announces a new Community Technology Preview and related technology for its Atlas AJAX style development platform.

Microsoft has made some announcements around its Atlas Asynchronous JavaScript and XML style development platform, including a new CTP and an Atlas Control Toolkit.

On April 10 Microsoft released the April CTP (Community Technology Preview) of Atlas, which includes fixes of bugs identified by users of the March CTP, the Redmond, Wash., company said.

With the March CTP, Microsoft announced a Go Live license for Atlas. The April CTP includes no new functionality. However, the bug fixes will address issues users presented to Microsoft and will enhance developers ability to create Web solutions that can go into production.

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In a blog post on April 10, Shanku Niyogi, product unit manager of the UI Framework and Services team at Microsoft, said of the new Atlas CTP, "One behavior change we made, which will be of interest if youre using Atlas to write gadgets: for security reasons, weve disabled cross-domain access to DataService services by default.

"Instead, youll have to manually add the WebOperation attribute to the Select, Insert, Update, or Delete methods on a data service to access them via HTTP GET requests. Since all network access in gadgets happens cross-domain (via an iframe), any gadgets that use the DataService will be affected."

Microsoft also revised its Atlas Web site to give it a new look and to feature Atlas in some of the controls. The site also presents learning material such as updated documentation, Webcasts, screencasts, expert videos and Quickstart tutorials.

Click here to read more about Microsofts Atlas AJAX development tool.

On April12, Microsoft released the Atlas Control Toolkit. The tool kit includes full source code, documentation and working samples to help Web developers. Microsoft said that in the near future, it will release the code in the tool kit as a community Shared Source project that enables developers at Microsoft and selected community members to contribute to the code base and augment the tool kit for everyone to use.

The Atlas Control Toolkit is intended to enable developers using Microsofts Visual Studio to quickly and easily build controls that take advantage of Atlas client-side technologies and are readily consumable by server-side ASP.Net developers. Microsoft officials said Web developers can use the Atlas Control Toolkit in their Atlas-enabled Web sites to build their own reusable Atlas components.

Microsoft also recently posted Release Candidate 1 of the new Web Application Project option for Visual Studio 2005. This new model is aimed at Web developers who are converting a Visual Studio .Net 2003 Web project to Visual Studio 2005. The Web Application Project provides the same conceptual Web project approach as Visual Studio 2003, but with all the new features of VS 2005 and ASP.Net 2.0.

Microsoft officials said the Web Application Project was created in response to customer feedback from users who were running into problems migrating existing applications to the new Web Site Project model in Visual Studio 2005.

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