The March CTP of Atlas, the Microsoft Ajax framework for ASP.NET, has been released. Notable features:
1. It comes with a Go Live License
2. Samples and documentation provided
3. An 18 minutes demo video by Scott Guthrie himself

Atlas can be downloaded from http://atlas.asp.net . Enjoy!

 

The patent–issued on Valentine’s Day–covers all rich-media technology implementations, including Flash, Flex, Java, Ajax, and XAML, when the rich-media application is accessed on any device over the Internet, according to the patent holders.

A patent has been granted to a relatively unknown California Web-design firm for an invention its creator says covers the design and creation of most rich-media applications used over the Internet. The patent holder, Balthaser Online Inc., says it could license nearly any rich-media Internet application across a broad range of devices and networks.

Potentially tens of thousands of businesses–not only software makers employing its business processes but companies offering rich-media on their Websites–could be subject to licensing fees when they use rich-media technology over the Internet.

The patent–issued on Valentine’s Day–covers all rich-media technology implementations, including Flash, Flex, Java, Ajax, and XAML, when the rich-media application is accessed on any device over the Internet, including desktops, mobile devices, set-top boxes, and video game consoles, says inventor Neil Balthaser, CEO of Balthaser Online, which he owns with his father Ken. “You can consider it a pioneering or umbrella patent. The broader claim is one that basically says that if you got a rich Internet application, it is covered by this patent.”

“It’s kind of unbelievable that [the patent] has such a wide ranging use because it covers so many technologies,” says Bola Rotibi, a senior analyst at Ovum, an IT advisory firm in London. If the patent is enforced broadly, she says, “anybody who does anything with rich applications will have to pay royalties to the company.”

The patent, No. 7,000,180 or 180 for short, is entitled Methods, Systems, And Processes For The Design And Creation Of Rich-Media Applications Via The Internet. It contains 83 claims that encompass a wide range of rich-media Net application methods, systems, and processes.

How broad is the patent? Here’s what the patent abstract says it covers: A host computer, containing processes for creating rich-media applications, is accessed from a remote user computer system via an Internet connection. User account information and rich-media component specifications are uploaded over the Internet for a specific user account. Rich-media applications are created, deleted, or modified in a user account, with rich-media components added to, modified in, or deleted from the rich-media application based on information contained in a user request. After creation, the rich-media application is viewed or saved on the host computer system, or downloaded to the user computer system over the Internet.

Because he began developing the methods and processes more than a half decade ago, he believes he can prove his invention is novel and nonobvious, two requirements to get a patent, and can fend off any patent challenges from potential licensees who might contend the invention is neither new nor obscure. “Are we ready to defend our patent?” Balthaser asks. “Absolutely. We’re ready to defend it vigorously if we have to. But [litigation is] not the approach we’re taking in terms of licensing.”

Source: informationweek

 

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

 

Think of how responsive Google Maps or GMail are, and imagine that kind of performance on your corporate intranet or your B2B extranet. That's what Microsoft hopes to deliver with development tools built on Ajax.

Ajax, or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is the technology underlying Google Maps, GMail, Microsoft's own MSN.com and Hotmail, and other highly responsive applications on the Web. It's a conglomeration of technologies that cover everything from presentation and object modeling to data interchange and retrieval. Microsoft thinks Ajax apps are too hard to build, and the company's Web platform team is trying to demystify Ajax with the development of an easier-to-use Ajax-style programming technology code-named "Atlas" that it's planning to bring to market during the first half of 2006. A prototype of the technology is available here.)

InformationWeek's Tony Kontzer recently caught up with Brian Goldfarb, Microsoft's product manager overseeing the development of Atlas. An edited version of the E-mail interview follows.

Read More

 

Introduction

ASP.NET page processing model is post back based. That means in order to handle any server side event you must post the form back to the server. This event driven model is certainly powerful and rich but it has drawbacks of its own. Now a days many browsers support client side JavaScript and DHTML. AJAX model is all about making intelligent use of browser's capabilities to give better user experience. In Part 1 of this series I will explain what AJAX is with a simple example.

What is AJAX?

AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML. AJAX by no way is a new technology. The parts of AJAX i.e. HTML, XML, DOM, XMLHTTP and JavaScript are being used for years. AJAX refers to use of these individual pieces together.

Imagine a web form with a TextBox, a Label and a Button. The TextBox is supposed to accept a CustomerID and on the click of the button you are supposed to retrieve the total orders placed by the customer and display in the Label. How will you do it in normal way?

You will write Click event handler for the Button and inside the event handler you will write all the code to retrieve the total orders depending on the CustomerID specified in the TextBox. That means for each and every CustomerID you will cause a post back to the server. Think what will happen if your page contains lots of other controls or heavy images. Naturally the overall network traffic will be much more resulting in a poor performance.

AJAX can solve such problems. Using AJAX you don't cause frequent post backs to the server. Instead you give requests to server side resources (web forms for example) from the client browser itself. Once the request returns the data you update the controls accordingly.

On one hand AJAX can give much better user experience and performance but on the other hand you also need to worry about things such as browsers not supporting JavaScript and cross browser JavaScript.

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Ajax is an awesome technology that is driving a new generation of web apps, from maps.google.com to colr.org to backpackit.com. But Ajax is also a dangerous technology for web developers, its power introduces a huge amount of UI problems as well as server side state problems and server load problems.

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