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

Ok, I just realized that I have not blogged in almost a month. So if I still have any readers, you may be interested in what my sessions are about at Tampa Code Camp if you have already signed up. We are completely full, and then some. I have been so busy working on a control for the atlas toolkit that mimics a balloon behavior similar to netflix and the many other things i do in my day and night jobs. I am doing two sessions tomorrow at Tampa Code Camp, one on Code generation and the ohter on how to create an atlas control. I am refactoring the balloon behavior again and am anxious to get it out there. In the code generation session I am going to show you how we bult tampa code camp using codesmith tools. I have fallen in love with that software. I don't think in sql anymore. Pretty cool.

See you there!

For all you who would like to learn more about Atlas here in Tampa, Joe Healy and I are speaking on Wednesday, June 14, 2006 here in Tampa. Joe is going to talk about how to start with Atlas along with an overview and how to start with the Atlas Toolkit. I am going to get advanced and talk about how to best debug the atlas applications along with writing your own custom atlas control. I will also touch on script# from Nikil as well as talk about some advanced javascript features. You can check out the event details and signup here. I also have written a atlas control that you all will be able to download a beta of after the talk. I have been so busy writing the control and working that I haven't posted in a while. Hard to keep up sometimes. Hope to see you all there!

Now this is some very cool stuff. Nikhil, the architect of Atlas, has released a prototype to create atlas / ajax apps in c# without writing javascript code. You can check the post and download some bits here. I haven't had time to play with it yet, but I will post a review when I do. I actually like writing javascript, but i will try anything that makes life easier when writing complex ajax apps.

Have fun!

I recently ran into this post from Julien Couvreur on his blog. He ported his XMLHttpRequest Debugging user script that works with firefox to IE. You can check out more about it here. I tried it out and it works pretty slick.

Wow, I had no idea there were so many ajax frameworks. Here is the list of 50 that I found here. I guess it makes sense since it is so new and everyone likes to have full control, so they write their own. I know I did also, but it is no where close to the quality to let anyone else use it.

Although I am slightly biased, my choice is Atlas.
I am now migrating all of my old ajax stuff to atlas. I have played with many frameworks, and Atlas is by far the most complete. It is a little more complicated, but also more powerful. It really is an extension of JavaScript and I predict will be the standard way to implement good practices ajax programming. Anyone wanting to get involved with ajax programming in asp.net 2.0 really needs to be using Atlas. Microsoft is adding some cool features and it will integrate right into the Visual Studio IDE. This is where the future is headed, so no need to learn frameworks that you will be porting from in the future.

Have fun!

The new Atlas control kit has been updated a few days ago. This release incorporates a bunch of community feature feedback, fixes a lot of bugs, adds support for the Safari browser, and introduces another 4 new Atlas-enabled controls to the 9 introduced with the first release. You can download it from this link: http://atlas.asp.net/default.aspx?tabid=47&subtabid=477.

Have fun, the controls make it really easy to add atlas functionality to your site.

Bertrand Le Roy, a dev on the Atlas team has built a tool for documenting Atlas classes called ScriptDoc. You can download it from this link; http://www.gotdotnet.com/workspaces/workspace.aspx?id=5d6cbdb9-c177-40f2-98db-71ec86a467cc.

I haven't had time to use it yet, but it will definitley help keep my javascript more organized.

The other night I was doing a quick session on how to make live.com gadgets using Atlas. I couldn't actually show the atlas way working because I was getting a javascript error of 'm_contentIE is undefined'. I had to resort to just the xml, js, and css files way the live.com folks do it. The new atlas:Gadget control makes it so much easier. To get it work you have to add more trusted sites like *.start.com, *.live.com and localhost in internet explorer security settings. The * is what does it. Covers all current and future subdomains. This is only if you are testing from localhost as far as I know. Here is a post on it, that was shown to me during my session by Joe Healy.
http://microsoftgadgets.com/forums/5184/ShowPost.aspx .
I thank him for showing me that, I was about ready to pull my hair out debugging the live.com javascript code earlier that day getting ready for my session. Found out the reason I was able to get raw xml way working was because I Could set binding options inline = true. When using atlas:gadget you are stuck with the xml that is generating when calling page.aspx?gadget=true. I hope this helps at least one person trying to fix this problem.