ATLAS to be released around the end of the year

I can finally talk about this.  The V1.0 of the Microsoft AJAX framework code named ATLAS will be shipped around the end of the year.  It will be “Fully supported” which means that customer support services are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year and that any customer can request hotfixes in the event that they encounter a bug affecting their application. 

In order to meet this date, we will be shipping a “core” set of functionality including all the common components needed to enable developers to build client-side controls/components, as well as the server-side functionality that provides integration within ASP.NET (including the super-popular update-panel and other assorted controls).  There are features of the current “Atlas” CTP drops that won’t be in the fully supported “core” bucket. These features will continue to be available in a separate download and will continue to work on top of the supported “core” release.  We will obviously continue to support a Go-Live license for all features going forward.  Overtime we will be moving more and more features into the fully supported bucket.

Naming:

1) The client-side “Atlas” javascript library is going to be called the Microsoft AJAX Library.  This will work with any browser, and also support any backend web server (read these blog posts to see how to run it on PHP and ColdFusion).

2) The server-side “Atlas” functionality that nicely integrates with ASP.NET will be called the ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions.  As part of this change the tag prefix for the “Atlas” controls will change from <atlas:>to <asp:>. 

3) The “Atlas” Control Toolkit today is a set of free, shared source controls and components that help you get the most value from the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions.  Going forward, the name of the project will change to be the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit.

Watch for a white paper with details in late September.