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.

Ok, now some of you may already know this, so don't laugh too hard that I have been writing Ajax - style apps for almost a year and have just been using fiddler to do most of my debugging. If you have not heard of fiddler you can get that here.

Anyway, I stumbled across a very easy way to debug javascript with Visual Studio 2005. I assume this also works for older versions. All that you need to do is put debugger; on the line where you want to set a breakpoint and then open the page in IE and it will ask you if what debugger you want to use. Note: You need to make sure you are allowing javascript to be debugged in IE by checking the appropiate checkbox in intenet options > advanced.

Once the debugger is open you can step though the code like you normally would in a c# app and watch the variables. If you are making ajax calls and returning xml or javascript you can also see that data come back. If you are using JSON you can actually continue stepping through that code that was returned from you server in runtime. Pretty cool stuff! It has just made my life so much easier and I am suprised I have not heard of this before. I guess I had my head in the sand for a little bit. I hope this helps someone who has been looking for how to do this.

Looks like some people have been listening to us developers about what we want. Microsoft has released shared source controls to simplify Atlas development. Pretty cool stuff. I am already starting to create controls. Have fun!

http://atlas.asp.net/atlastoolkit/