We finished teched in mumbai and chennai with chennai having the maximum turnout so far. It was a huge audience with a lot of people who had worked on ajax extensively and even atlas to come extent. As promised here is a FAQ that i have prepared based on the questions asked in the teched cities so far. I will keep appending to this list as i recollect more questions -
q. Is atlas going to be supported in mobile devices?a.`Atlas is not supported on mobile and neither is ajax as mobile browsers have limited support for javascript.
q.Is updatecontrol supported on safari ?a. As of now no, but in future releases it will be but that is because of the way xmlHttpRequest is implemented in safari.
q. Can i pass user credentials from the client side when making a web request?a. As of now you cannot pass the credentials using atlas, though you can edit the atlas javascript code implementing the WebRequest class to pass the same.
q. How do I start using Atlas in my existing asp.net 2.0 applications ?
a. You would first need to identify what kind of richness do you want to bring into your applications, is it just greater responsiveness, more client interactivity, richer client behaviors, or all of these. Then start mapping where all would you need the client centric application model (atlas client script library ) and where would you need to use the server centric model ( essentially the new atlas server controls and extender controls). Once you identify what pieces you need, you can start building your "atlas" asp.net website using the atlas project template in visual studio which does all the configurations for you to use atlas in asp.net web apps.
q. Isnt atlas heavy compared to other frameworks ?
a. Atlas does a lot more compared to other framework...other ajax frameworks dont provide support for client side data binding,evaluating xml-script on the client side etc and it also provides complete integration with asp.net platform