ASP .NET ATLAS - Great Overview Video from ScottGu
This stuff is just cool, our AJAX framework ATLAS (https://atlas.asp.net) is a great toolset for rich web applications. This short video from Scott Guthrie (his blog is outstanding) shows a simple scenario…
https://download.microsoft.com/download/8/5/8/85803fdd-fe9a-4783-ab37-e0c565172ffd/asp_net_atlas.wmv
Even outside of seeing how easy it is to Atlas enable an application it’s a good overview of Visual Web Developer Express and SQL Server 2005 Express which are our free development tools for the web, Atlas is also a free download.
Short description: This is a great demo that shows off the power of our tools for building applications that would have been so hard to so in the past.
First 12 minutes – set up a fully functional ToDo list with data stored in a database:
- Create a database
- Build a table (including identity field)
- Build a data layer (including some methods)
- Testing those functions
- Build a MasterPage (for constant UI)
- Add in CSS support
- Create basic layout ContentArea and a Heading
- Build a basic WebForm (web page)
- Inherit from the MasterPage
- Include a few server controls (DropDownList, GridView)
- Bind the GridView to the Data Access Layer
- Make the GridView editable, sortable, pagable
- Filter the GridView with the DropDownList
- Add a DetailsView control to support inserting a new item
Next 6 minutes – add Atlas (AJAX) support to the site to improve the user experience.
So now we have a very functional page with a ToDo list, after building this basic site we now want to Atlas enable it – in the next minute we:
- Add Atlas support
- Add a content panel for dynamic updates
- Add a trigger used for the updates
The site now does a bit of the work on the client only – cool for a few extra lines of mark-up (no code).
Scott then goes onto add more Atlas support and a particularly cool piece is the UpdateProgress control which lets you inform the user the an Async call is going on in the background to the server.
Finally you see that this stuff works on both IE and FireFox!
All-in-all a great little video it’s about 18 minutes long but covers so many of the basic concepts of these products. I’d encourage you to view it ;)
Still want more: well look at this tutorial for a much more exciting application ;)