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

.NetTiers has just released it's 2.0 version and it is the best architecture / code generation template ever released. For those of you who do not know about the whole code generation thing, I feel sorry for you. You will not believe the amount of time you will save generating code. I have been writing my own code generators since 1998 when i used Lingo to write html and perl. No joke! Anyway, I have been writing a vb and c# code generator the last 3 years for my own good, but ever since I stumbled across nettiers template for codesmith, I have stopped my own development. These guys knock it out for you. It is the best code generator template out there for .net 2.0. I religiously use this for every project i have had for 6 months now. The new release fixes many things and is very easy to use. You can definitely take extreme programming to the next level with this stuff.

Well as you can see I am pretty excited about this stuff and so much that I asked if I could help with nettiers. I was lucky enough to be added as a developer to the open source project. I am going to focus on adding some atlas / ajax to the admin since it is what i have the most passion for and experience playing around with the atlas control toolkit for the last 4 months.

Well the guys at Microsoft released the September release of the Atlas Control Toolkit. This is a great release with some cool features like animation and nobot along with some cool sliders. My balloon did not get in this time around because of some unforeseen bugs. Those guys are fun to work with and they work very hard. I see code check ins at midnight and sometimes 3 in the morning. They really worked hard to get this release solid and you can tell when you look at it. Have fun! The animation stuff is really amazing. You would swear its flash.

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!