I spent the last week checking out a variety of different approaches with ATLAS and building a few samples for my session at ASP.NET Connections.

I find ATLAS a really mixed bag. Some things are done really well and work easily, while some aspects take a lot of work. I think the hardest component of ATLAS is the client API framework and the Xml Script Markup. This is primarily because there's absolutely 0 official documentation on any of the APIs or even an overview that explains how it all hangs together.

So here are a few links that I've found useful looking at this stuff over the last couple of weeks. Some of these are obvious, but I like to have one place to find everything here and I ordered them from easier to more complex:

QuickStart Guides

The quick start guides are the best place to start with ATLAS as they show a few simple and easy to understand examples that you can view online. Although the samples are very basic, they are a great starting point and I find myself going back there frequently to look up and compare how what I'm doing matches the syntax with what the samples do.

http://atlas.asp.net/quickstart/default.aspx

Scott Guthrie's recent ATLAS Samples

In the same vain as the Quickstart Guides, Scott published his samples from a recent conference today. There's a handful of really simple examples that demonstrate the core features of ATLAS nicely and they offer a great starting point to play around with. Scott was kind enough to send me his slides and these samples a while back and while there are really simple they are very to the point and demonstrate the key principles of ATLAS very well. This is a perfect starting point for playing with ATLAS:

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/03/12/440068.aspx

It's pretty much common knowledge that Scott's Blog in general is one of the best ASP.NET resources in general, so if you're not subscribed to it – you should …

Here's another nice smaller app from Scott that puts some of the server ATLAS pieces together:

Task List Application:

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/12/26/433997.aspx

Wilco Bauer's Stuff

Some of the best documentation comes from third parties. Especially Wilco Bauwer who's been cranking out a bunch of useful BLOG entries and also the indispensable Client Side ATLAS Class Browser. The class browser is the closest thing to documentation available at the moment short of scanning through the JavaScript source (which is not for the faint of heart ). Wilco's also been posting some great advice on a variety of ATLAS topics on the ASP.NET Forums. You can search for Wilco's post's on forums.asp.net for some more advanced code samples. Great stuff, and thanks Wilco!

Garbin's Blog

Another great resource with more low level information on ATLAS. There are several very detailed entries for client script and XmlScript coding that are among the best information I've found on client scripting so far.

http://aspadvice.com/blogs/garbin/default.aspx

Nikhil's Cool but complex Samples

Last but not least is Nikhil's stuff. Nikhil Kothari is the lead designer for ATLAS and he's been Blogging about various features extensively and with some detail. He's also put together some fairly complex samples like the ATLAS Wiki (which you can download) and Virtual Places (not sure if you can download that or not). The Wiki sample is a good one to find a lot of variety in client behaviors and XmlScript applied, although digging through this code is difficult. Not the kind of app one casually follows especially when one's new to ATLAS. But there's a lot of code there to look at and get ideas from and see how to put the scripts work.

Nikhil's Blog:

http://www.nikhilk.net/

ATLAS Wiki Sample:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/info/future/atlas_wiki/

Working with ATLAS client framework at the moment is tough – mainly because the lack of documentation. Everything is a guess or looking at the few existing samples and hoping what you're trying to accomplish is covered somewhere. However, I do have to say that after a few false starts, that ATLAS does have much of the functionality that I would like to see in an AJAX framework. You have the ability to do low level data stuff and using raw JavaScript as well as the ability to use the more high level tools like the client script framework and declarative client script. In addition, Microsoft provides some tools that make it really easy to add functionality to existing pages with none or very few changes at all to the page setup.

Microsoft appears to be ready to put out another CTP soon that expands on the functionality brought with the January CTP of ATLAS. According to the grapevine and hinted announcements it looks there's going to be a go live license coming soon – possibly with the release of this new CTP.

To be honest I'm a little surprised by that if true. While ATLAS is actually surprisingly stable (on IE and FireFox at least) for such a big toolset, the fact that there has yet to be any documentation on the client side APIs published makes it seem really odd to be already heading for a go-live license.

Go-live seems to indicate that the APIs and core framework at least are in a stable state and won't change drastically at least to the tune of not breaking existing code. I'm not sure if there's been enough beating on this stuff for this to be a good thing .

On the other hand a Go-Live license also is a big incentive to have people start using ATLAS for real work rather than just demos and discovery type code like I'm doing .

We shall see.