This session probably had the most relevance to my current project at work and it was pretty exciting to see in action just what ATLAS is going to be able to provide me in the future.

Rick was a great speaker and his demos really did a great job of quickly showing just what ATLAS could do for you. It was particularly nice to see just how easily you can convert an old ASP.NET web application to take advantage of AJAX with ATLAS. It basically consists of putting any controls you want to AJAX-ify into an update panel that you just drag and drop onto your webform. That’s nice. VERY nice.

Basically if you’re not familiar with AJAX, it’s a technology that allows you to do a partial post-back of content on a page so that an entire page doesn’t have to re-render in the browser. This is quite an advancement for UI development for web apps (although it’s not really a new technology, it’s just not been used much) and it takes web applications one step closer to although still not having “state”, at least simulating “state”.

ATLAS is a framework for .NET that makes developing your web applications to utilize AJAX a whole lot easier and watching it in action it looks like Microsoft has a great start on it. While I wouldn’t describe everything as easy, what I did see was a lot easier then trying to implement AJAX in your web pages yourself without the ATLAS framework.

This session, I was reacquainted with my favorite person of annoyance again, and they did indeed proceed to halt the session several times with some questions that just weren’t appropriate for the format. Rick (just like Lucas) showed amazing patience and was quite skillful at putting the session back on track again although it did end up going a bit long because of the side tracking questions. (Please people if you have idle curiosity about something, go home and play with it, don’t force the presenter to play with it during a free session with limited time. Those kind of questions just aren’t appropriate.)

Rick has been quite generous and has his demos and slides up on his site (get them soon, he’s not planning on keeping them there for long), so even if you couldn’t make it to Code Camp, take a look at his demos if you want to get a feel for what ATLAS can do for your ASP.NET web application.