Jim Zimmerman - ASP.NET, MVC, Ajax and ORM

I was lucky enough to be able to attend the Atlas SDR (Strategic Design Review) last week in Redmond. For those of you who do not know what that is, what they do is invite 30 or so people for 3 days to help teach, discuss and learn what developers want to see in the product. Not knowing exactly what I can or can't say about the next version of Visual Studio, I will say that I want the next version of Visual Studio now!

My head is still spinning on the amazing things they are doing in Atlas. I must say that Nikhil Kothari is a genius. Being the architect of Atlas, he was easilty able to help me understand some very in-depth concepts on how Atlas works. I am very lucky to have met him and had some great instruction from. This javascript framework they have come up with goes so deep, that it is hard to grasp all at once. I am going to put up some demos soon on how to use some of this stuff in the real world. There are some very compelling scenarios that are not as hard as one might think.

If you haven't already be sure to download the April CTP from atlas.asp.net and download the docs. There are some pretty cool demos to get you started and the new control toolkit gives you a good on idea on how you can extend the framework yourself.