Review: Microsoft Cleanses ASP.Net With Ajax
With the release of a free framework called Atlas, Microsoft extends some of the controls it provides in its ASP.Net technology for developing Web applications. New browser control functionality also can be created by using JavaScript and the Atlas framework.
The Atlas framework, available at http://atlas.asp.net, relies mainly on the strengths of the ASP.Net programming model, which lets developers write code in a declarative or a programmatic form. Right now, Atlas is only providing simple Ajax controls for user-interface behaviors, data binding and data validation, including the server controls necessary to implement partial page rendering, updates and panel triggers.
Microsoft also is offering an Atlas control toolkit for free. The toolkit acts as a wrapper by extending the framework with a set of client-side Ajax controls that provide button functionality, panel dragging, mouse hovering and many other UI control types.
Although Atlas is free, CRN Test Center engineers couldn't find any open-source licensing or terms of use of the Atlas framework and the Atlas SDK. There's always the chance that Microsoft will add many more Atlas controls to ASP.Net and other programming platforms in upcoming versions, but don't expect them to be free. If Atlas takes off, as the Test Center expects, the next release of Visual Studio will probably have many new ASP.Net controls, but developers will have to pay for them.
Atlas also has simplified calling SOAP-based and REST-based Web services, which are difficult to program in JavaScript on browsers because of their internal local resource restrictions. Atlas provides a bridge that runs within the scope of applications running its framework.
The bridge isolates browsers from the application through gateways. The Atlas service bridge provides complex interaction between ASP.Net code and client code to access Web services, so developers can pass just about any data stream they like to browsers. Hopefully, this rich asynchronous functionality won't produce new holes for hackers to exploit.
On sites where developers can't register Atlas extensions on Internet Information Services (IIS), the Atlas team has done a good job showing how to register its asynchronous tunneling protocol by simply adjusting local configuration files and letting IIS on hosted environments pick these changes from local Web sites.
Developers can use Atlas with the new Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) platform for building software services beyond ASP.Net's capabilities. Developers have to bind a new DLL to a Web site so that assemblies running WCF can work with Atlas. With WCF, developers can extend enterprise services and even non-Windows applications through HTTP and non-HTTP protocols.
Essentially, WCF acts as a unified wrapper for network transports and hosting environments. WCF allows developers to register services directly on sites. It doesn't take advantage of ASP.Net, but it can reproduce the ASP.Net functionality. This is Microsoft's answer to move developers away from today's scripting code mismatch inherited from previous versions of ASP.Net.
The Atlas team has done a bang-up job documenting all the features, including adding demonstration code for the C# implementation on the server side. For each major feature, for example, the documentation shows exactly what needs to be done on ASP.Net code and how JavaScript must be created to interact with the server.
As far as browser compatibility goes, the Atlas implementation follows current ASP.Net guidelines, so there shouldn't be any low-level browser execution problems on any client-side code. However, Test Center engineers only tested some code using Internet Explorer.