Microsoft Releases Go-Live License For Atlas

Partners attending Microsoft's Mix06 conference in Las Vegas said the new license, along with a more-robust preview version of Atlas also released on Monday, will let them take advantage of Microsoft's emerging Web technologies.

"Now we can start slipping Atlas into all of our projects," said Scott Stanfield, CEO of Vertigo Software, a pure-Microsoft development shop in Point Richmond, California. "I don't know if that's going to save money or reduce the cost of development, but we'll have a better user experience, and that's what we're after."

Microsoft introduced Atlas in September at its PDC conference and has issued a succession of CTP (community technology preview) builds every few weeks since then. The March CTP of Atlas went up on Microsoft's ASP.Net developer site this morning. Stanfield said early Atlas CTPs were buggy and carried a steep learning curve, but he likes what he's seen of the new one. "Today what we're seeing is a first solid beta," he said.

Atlas will eventually be part of Microsoft's next Visual Studio version, code-named Orcas. In the meantime, Microsoft hopes developers will make use of its preview Atlas releases. AJAX programming techniques help Web applications mimic desktop software, quickly and elegantly pulling data from a server without requiring a complete browser refresh. The problem with AJAX, in Microsoft's view, is that it's too complicated.

Developer Arthur Wait, product manager for book sales tracking service TitleZ, backed that assessment.

"I've done raw AJAX calls and it's pretty straightforward initially, but as soon as you get down to trying to do something useful with AJAX, it gets very complicated, very fast," Wait said.

TitleZ runs on ASP.Net 2.0 with a SQL Server database. Running completely on a Microsoft stack simplified development and let Wait add features like interactive charts without ever writing a line of JavaScript. Functionality that would have taken days to code with AJAX protocols could be written in hours by drawing on Atlas libraries, Wait said.

"The thing I found when I was looking at open-source platforms is that they're free like a puppy is free -- there are back-end costs. It would take an enormous amount of futzing to get things working. I want my designs to work well and I want fast results," Wait said. "It became pretty clear that going with a single provider that has a stack all designed to work hand-in-hand together was the way to go."

Somewhat unusually for Microsoft, Atlas is relatively platform agonistic. The goal is for Atlas-built sites to function identically in Internet Explorer and on non-Microsoft browsers like Firefox and Safari. On the server side, Atlas is deployable on platforms including Linux and Apache Web server, although taking full advantage of the toolkit requires using ASP.Net.