What I like about Atlas and Why

If you aren’t familiar with Atlas it is a framework for building richer, more interactive applications.

The first thing that comes to mind is "experience", the user experience is so much better thanks to Atlas.  If the visitor of your website does not have to endure alot of postbacks to access content and/or navigate your site all the better.  The seemless integration with ASP.NET 2.0 makes it very easy to AJAX enable applications without having to write alot of code.  The one I used recently was the accordion control (from the Atlas Control Toolkit) for an FAQ page.

The "Atlas Control Toolkit" is a free library of Atlas enabled controls.  There are 21 controls in the latest CTP and the goal is somewhere between 50 – 100 controls by the end of the year.  All the source is freely available with modification license for this project hosted on CodePlex.

If you haven’t had a chance to check out what Atlas can do for your ASP.NET 2.0 application you might want to check out this video by Scott Guthrie "Developing ASP.NET 2.0 Applications using Atlas", there are more videos here in case you want more.

Atlas Documentation and Resources

Atlas Sample Applications

Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Member/Role Management with IIS, Part 3: AJAX Enhancements with Microsoft Atlas (ASP.NET Technical Articles)

Technorati Tags: Atlas – Ajax – ASP.NET