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

I don't know about you all , but I think the biggest ajax problem is the "back button problem". For example, I built this cool build a car application and my wife would click the next button and then when she wanted to change something and go back she would hit the back button and say, "What happened? Where did the car go?". That was when I realized that we had to come up with a solution for the back button browser problem in ajax. Well it looks as if Nikhil has come up with a good solution for this problem here: http://www.nikhilk.net/BackButtonSupport.aspx . I haven't had time to implement his stuff, but he is the father of Atlas, so I am sure it probably works as advertised. He has some great stuff on his site on how to implement it.

Scott Guthrie just announced Atlas 1.0 Naming and Roadmap. This is great because it will be released to work with vs 2005 and be fully supported. They listened to alot of people that want the new technology now and they are delivering. Here is a little excerpt of what he said:

"Many people have asked us to deliver a fully-supported 1.0 release of �Atlas� before the next release of Visual Studio. �Fully supported� means that Microsoft product support services are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year and that any customer can obtain hotfixes if they encounter a bug affecting their application. It also means that the product has a committed servicing product lifetime of 10 years � which provides companies with the ability to depend on it for mission critical applications.

I am excited to announce today that we are going to ship this fully supported �Atlas� 1.0 release on top of ASP.NET 2.0 and ensure that it works with Visual Studio 2005. Our goal is to ship the �Atlas� 1.0 release around the end of this year. The plan is to first have a Beta, then an RC, and then decide on the final date based on customer feedback."

Good stuff!

Here is a great post on how to increase the speed of you javascript in IE from the IE Blog. http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/08/28/728654.aspx
It has some very valuable information on how to optimize your javascript. I am already changing some of my code.

Also here is a good post from Nikhil about Script Loading Tips. He has some good info on how to load scripts sooner than window.onload. It's some pretty cool stuff.
Have fun!

I just got back from Jacksonville CodeCamp this weekend and was very impressed with how organized it was. My hats off to Dennis and Vinay along with the many volunteers that did such a good job with the Code Camp. If it wasn't for you guys, this would not be possible. I really like the people I meet in Jacksonville. It is always fun!

For those of you that are into Code Generation you need to check out the new NetTiers release for Codesmith. NetTiers is an open source template for CodeSmith. It has options to include the atlas framework and atlas control toolkit along with so many other features like web service generation, admin generation, VSTS unit tests, DAL, etc. It is really unbelievable. I use it on every project now and it has simplified my life. It is really amazing how these guys are producing one of the smartest ways to architect your application for free. Well you need Codesmith, but the templates are open source. Its a great way to learn generics and the enterprise library. I swear by it now. Look into it if you are interested in saving time. Be aware of the learning curve. It is worth it at the end though.

Funny, i Just found out there is a magazine for Ajax called AjaxWorld. There are probably more magazines out there dedicated to Ajax, but i have not run into them yet. I ran into this article today and thought I would share it with you. It is a nice primer for those of you wanting to learn more about the features and potential of Atlas from a third party perspective.

Microsoft just released the first Atlas Control Toolkit with controls from non-microsoft authors. My balloon control did not make it into this release but will be put in the next one to allow for proper testing. There are some cool new controls that I think everyone will enjoy. I especially like the ratings and dynamicpopulate control. Shawn Burke did a great job on the DynamicPopulate Control and I thank him for allowing me to add the customScript feature so that you can call javascript to populate a control instead of a web service or a page method. Sometimes this can be very useful.

Have fun!

Here is a very simple tutorial I saw on code project on how to use atlas to create a quiz. I like it because it shows how simple you can write atlas apps using straight javascript and html, but still using the atlas library to do the web service call management. Alot of times this is how I prefer to write ajax / atlas apps. I am also a big fan of the atlas toolkit, because you can resuse javascript now in such a cleaner way. Check out the toolkit here. And if you are so bold as to want to play with the source code, you can find that here.