The January CTP build of Atlas was made available today and can be downloaded from http://atlas.asp.net.  This is a pretty big release of Atlas that has a number of new and improved goodies.

In particular, the Atlas team has spent a lot of time enhancing and fleshing out a number of the core scenarios around the new <atlas:updatepanel> server control -- including adding progress message support, error handling, support for Response.Redirects, and the ability to have some controls on a page perform regular full-page post-backs while others cause incremental Ajax updates of content.

The beauty of the <atlas:updatepanel> control is that it enables you to take an existing ASP.NET page with controls and Ajax enable it in under 5 minutes or less (including error handling + progress message UI, etc), without having to write a single line of javascript (note: Atlas also provides a very, very rich client javascript library if you want to use that as well -- but you don't need to write to it at all unless you want to). 

Read More at Scott Guthries’ Blog