Examining the "Atlas" Control Toolkit

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Here is the last of the “server-centric” screencasts. Let me know if there is anything I haven’t covered that you wanted to see. You can view the latest screencast here. Here’s the Channel 9 description:

“Building on concepts from his previous screencasts, Microsoft Federal Developer Evangelist Marc Schweigert demonstrates more AJAX enabling capabilities of ASP.NET "Atlas."  You'll how to use a few of the controls from the "Atlas" Control Toolkit to add rich behavior to an ASP.NET 2.0 application. “

The “Atlas” Control Toolkit is one of many new shared source projects going on at Microsoft. Soma talks about “Shared Source projects from Developer Division” here. The repository for these projects is the new www.codeplex.com. James Newkirk announced CodePlex here. The best place to get all of your CodePlex questions answered is CodePlex Information and Discussion (which is a CodePlex project itself). One of the cool things about CodePlex is that it uses Team Foundation Server which means you can access it directly from Team Explorer (instructions here). Has all this intrigued you enough to want to contribute to the “Atlas” Control Toolkit? This link explains how you can contribute to a project on CodePlex.

I’ll be focusing on the “client-centric” approach to “Atlas” programming next. Right now, I plan on covering the following topics:

  • Calling web services and server page methods from client script
  • Declarative client side programming with “Atlas” Xml Script
  • Client side components , controls, and behaviors
  • Databinding & UI templates
  • Bridging to external web services
  • Leveraging ASP.NET 2.0 application services in ASP.NET Atlas (Membership, Profile, etc.)
  • Building a gadget for Live.com

These topics are subject to change. Multiple topics may be rolled into a single screencast. As always, I’m open to your feedback in shaping what I show.

-Marc

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, .NET, ASP.NET, Atlas, AJAX, Web 2.0