Atlas for ASP.NET grows up

September 30, 2006

In case you missed it, a couple of weeks ago, Scott Guthrie posted the “Atlas” 1.0 Naming and Roadmap. In it, he mentions that Atlas will be a fully supported product with a ten year product lifetime, a 1.0 release should be coming soon, additional features are still planned, and marketing is staying busy giving it creative new names.

To follow up on Scott’s announcement, Rick Strahl has a good article about the current state of ATLAS. He talks objectively about where it currently is at and what needs to happen to get it where it needs to be. While not belaboring minute details, he does hit the highlights of what Atlas is currently doing well and what needs to be improved.

One interesting thing from Rick’s article is the following quote:

If you’re going down the AJAX path, JavaScript is going to become a more important part of your development environment. This will get easier when Orcas arrives, but in the meantime we have to struggle with the existing tools. Investing some time getting acquainted with JavaScript should probably be high on your list of skills to acquire as a Web developer. Learning about JavaScript object orientation, prototypes, function pointers, closures (an excellent reference can be found here: jibbering.com/faq/faq_notes/closures.html ) and a handful of other concepts specific to JavaScript is a prerequisite to use the ATLAS client library which uses some advanced concepts to provide abstraction and .NET like functionality.

I’ve been doing web development since 1995 and long ago became quite intimate with JavaScript and how to make it do all sorts of cool things (like AJAX back in early 2002 before it even had a name). Only recently as we have been trying to staff up for a project at my day job it has become very apparent that there is a whole generation of ASP.Net programmers that have completely relied on the framework to do the heavy lifting for them. Sometimes that can be good, but as with most things Microsoft, their controls tend to take you about 80% of the way towards your solution and then you need to look for ways to do it yourself. On my projects at my day job, we have taken great effort to separate the developer from the complexities of JavaScript. I’m not so sure why that is though. JavaScript is one of my favorite languages because of its simplicity and power. Granted, it is not always easy to work with since there weren’t any good editors or debuggers for so long, but you either baked your own, or now you can rely on some of the frameworks that are out there.

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under .Net, AJAX, ASP.Net, Microsoft 

Comments

One Response to “Atlas for ASP.NET grows up”

  1. Richard on September 30th, 2006 10:59 pm

    I couldn’t agree more about the current generation of ASP.NET developers using server controls as a crutch.

    A lot of it is Microsoft’s fault though. They’ve been highlighting the fact that you can write entire applications without writing any “code” (i.e. all declarative markup.) They also create controls such as the SqlDataSource which comprises proper architecture for ease-of-development.

    The second that a lot of developers run into something out of the ordinary, they completely freeze up. I love ASP.NET as a platform but you still need a certain amount of skill to get the job done right.

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