ASP.NET Atlas is Kicking My Ass
I’m trying to put together a kickass demo for Mix06 next week. I spent the whole day today at home, fighting off a cold and trying to put together something demo-able.
My objective is to demonstrate how our stuff (specifically our XML services, but ideally also our slick new open-source UI libraries and JSON-serialized services) can work with Microsoft’s stuff (which in this case means the Atlas Ajax library for ASP.NET).
Putting together an example that shows how to proxy one of our REST services behind a .ASMX SOAP wrapper would work (because Atlas is set up to consume SOAP services and doesn’t know from REST). But in a certain respect that demo would also be "dumb" because one should not need to proxy anything with our services, ’cause our services can send serialized JavaScript directly to the browser, which can theoretically be consumed by Atlas classes. I say "theoretically" because nearly every presentation I’ve seen on Atlas says that it uses JSON for its own serialization, but there isn’t any documentation on how that works or how a civilian would access it (or if that even makes sense to do).
Kudos to Microsoft for breaking out of the "ship every 18 months whether we need to or not" mindset, but if today reminded me of anything, it’s that your stuff needs to be well-documented, even if it’s not ready for prime time yet. I am pretty sure they’re dropping a new build of Atlas at Mix06 next week, but that doesn’t help me tonight. Grumble.
Update: The day after I posted this, I got a big wet kiss via email from many many members of the Atlas team. Thanks, guys — because of your timely help I will have at least a basic Atlas demo for my Mix06 talk on Wednesday.
