“Atlas” naming and roadmap

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Over the last year I’ve been fortunate to be deeply involved in our “Atlas” project to bring rich AJAX support to ASP.NET; easily enabling developers and designers to deliver powerful, expressive experiences on the Web. Demands for amazing UX have increased over the last year and I’m extremely excited to announce our moves into the “Atlas” end game. This includes announcing details about the roadmap and final “Atlas” naming.

All the details of this are posted on Scott Guthrie’s blog here.

Highlights

  • We will be shipping a fully-supported version of the software that works on top of ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005
  • We will continue to ship CTP’s to enable agility and ensure that every amazing feature of “Atlas” exists in either a “core” set of fully-supported bits or a more agile community supported CTP that works on top of the “core.” The CTP will continue to support a Go-Live license.
  • Our plan is to have a beta soon, then an RC and then decide on the final date based on customer feedback.

  • Over time we will be moving more and more features into the fully supported bucket.

  • We'll have a whitepaper listing features, release plans, and product changes from the CTPs to help with planning in the next few weeks

“Atlas” Naming

My team has been working hard to finalize branding and naming for “Atlas” – I’m personally excited about the names and feel they do an excellent job of describing what the product is and how it works together.

1) The client-side “Atlas” javascript library is going to be called the Microsoft AJAX Library. This will work with any browser, and also support any backend web server (read these blog posts by Shanku Niyogi and Brad Abrams to see how to run it on PHP and ColdFusion).

2) The server-side “Atlas” functionality that integrates with ASP.NET will be called the ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions. As part of this change the tag prefix for the “Atlas” controls will change from <atlas:>to <asp:>. These controls will also be built into ASP.NET "Orcas"

3) The “Atlas” Control Toolkit today is a set of free, shared source controls and components that help you get the most value from the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions. Going forward, the name of the project will change to be the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit.

I’m super excited about all the great work that is being done with ASP.NET AJAX Extensions and all the customer excitement and usage. Read all the details on Scott Guthrie’s blog and let us know what you think!