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A Primer on Microsoft Atlas

Filed under: Web 2.0 News, Front Page, Tutorial, Atlas — Chris Cornutt at 8:34 am on Wednesday, August 2, 2006

So you’ve been reading up on the boatload of Ajax solutions out there and, with the countless number, it hard to keep track sometimes. A little while back, Microsoft tossed their own hat into the ring with Atlas, an offering to make life easier for ASP.NET users to get in on the Ajax fun. But where to start learning about this new technology? Well, this new article from the Ajax Developers Journal guides you through everything you’ll need to get started.

Iimplementing AJAX may not be easy since it involves writing a lot of code in a client-side scripting language like JavaScript and any developer who has worked with one would attest to the fact that developing and debugging complicated client scripts can sometimes be daunting. It can be even more daunting to maintain Web applications where the logic is interspersed between client and server code.

The Atlas framework from Microsoft promises to fill this gap and make it easier for the ASP.NET developer to easily develop interactive AJAX-enabled applications. In this article we’ll look at what ATLAS is and focus on the server controls that an ASP.NET developer can use to “AJAX-ify” his applications.

They start off with an introduction to what Atlas is and how it all works including the Atlas Server Controls and the Script Manager. They provide a sample bit of script here to illustrate how things fit together, including the terms/keywords EnablePartialRendering, EnableScriptComponents, ScriptReference, ServiceReference.

Next up is a look at some of the other panels/controls offered - the UpdatePanel (with the ControlEventTrigger and ControlValueTrigger), TimerControl, UpdateProgress, and how to extend and enhance the functionality already there. These include:

  • AutoComplete Extender
  • CollapsiblePanel
  • DragPanel Extender
  • AlwaysVisibleControl
  • TextBoxWatermark
  • HoverMenu

Simple Ajax Quiz using Atlas

Filed under: Web 2.0 News, Front Page, Tutorial, Atlas — Chris Cornutt at 11:06 am on Tuesday, August 1, 2006

Been wondering how to get Atlas and Ajax to play nicely together, but just don’t know how to get started? Well, this quick tutorial might be a good place to start. They show (complete with code) how to create a simple quiz for your site.

As my first article on Code Project, I’d like to talk about a little proof of concept I created around AJAX/Atlas techologies. When I saw this screencast, I thought it could be easily used for a simple AJAX quiz system, so here I am :) Code is really simple and there’s no error management, but maybe later I’ll update this code to create a more complete solution.

Of course, you’ll need Atlas installed and some sort of database (they chose SQL Server for ease) to hold the questions, but the rest is all up to the code you enter. They step you through the creation of the tables, the actual markup to generate the page, the web service to handle the user’s response, and, finally, the Javascript code to make it all work.