You can watch it streaming here, or download it for offline viewing here.

It includes the Web, Web.Net, Web.Data, Web.Services, Web.UI, Web.UI.Data namespaces.

If you prefer, however to explore the actual Atlas JavaScript files, but prefer a more “spaced out” version, check out Ralph Sommerer’s post. He’s got some funky “InScript Code Listing Enhancer” going on.

Looking at one of Ralph’s links (AtlasCore), you can click on the InScript link to see another representation of the classes/global variables/functions for each JavaScript file.

This is all very handy as there is still very little documentation aside from the Hands on Labs, and the QuickStart documentation.

I’d also recommend reading Wilco’s blog posts on Atlas.

I need to learn to be more patient during my presentations because I just ran the exact same demo on my PC at home.

And it took some time to load (over wifi).

It showed the same blank map canvas as it did during the demo, but for a brief moment or two. Perhaps the maps would have shown up if I had waited longer that night, rather than declaring straight away that the net connection was playing up? Possibly. Well, it’s all done and dusted now. Admittedly, I should have prepared for a worse case scenario rather than on the fly decide to go look for something I did several days ago (the hands on labs). But some of these things you learn through the experience of doing a presentation.

I had prepared several longitude and latitude locations to show a demo of the power of Atlas. How easy it was to use.

Below is the actual demo for those interested…

Here’s the code for the Virtual Earth part:

<atlas:VirtualEarthMap ID="VirtualEarthMap1" runat="server" Latitude="-37.83"
Longitude="144.98" MapStyle="Aerial" ZoomLevel="10" PushpinActivation="Hover">
</atlas:VirtualEarthMap>

The Lat/Long figures above are for South Yarra (37.83South/144.98East), which is where the presentation was held.

I had a few other Lat/Long figures prepared for the next part of that demo that didn’t go ahead.

The next step would have been to put two Atlas TextBox controls and one Atlas Button control onto the canvas above the Map.

So we end up adding:

<span>Latitude</span>
<input type="text" id="txtLat" />
<span>Longitude</span>
<input type="text" id="txtLong" />
<input type="button" id="btnChangeMapLocation" value="Change Map Location" onclick="Change_Location();" />code>

function Change_Location()
{
var latitude = document.getElementById("txtLat").value;
var longitude = document.getElementById("txtLong").value;

var veMapCtrl = document.getElementById("VirtualEarthMap1");
veMapCtrl.control.set_latitude(latitude);
veMapCtrl.control.set_longitude(longitude);
}

The first two lines are pretty simple, just getting the values entered by the user in the Latitude and Longitude text boxes.

I’ve not actually seen the last two lines documented anywhere, but after doing some “research” (digging into the AtlasUIMap.js file from the Atlas Script Library), they set the latitude and longitude values for the Virtual Earth map.

One thing to keep in mind, the “.control” means you’re accessing one of these Atlas controls.

Here’s a few Lat/Long locations I had prepared for the presentation (More Latitude/Longitude values):

There’s a lot more that can be done to show what is possible with Atlas, but this is all I had prepared for the presentation because of time constraints.

Full Source code for this demo:

<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="_Default" %>

<script type="text/xml-script">
<page xmlns:script="http://schemas.microsoft.com/xml-script/2005">
<references>
<!-- Repath the following src attributes, using regular client relative paths as necessary -->
<add src="ScriptLibrary/AtlasUI.js" />
<add src="ScriptLibrary/AtlasControls.js" />
</references>
<components>
</components>
</page>
</script>
</body>
</html>


Download full source.

Fig 1: Default Virtual Earth map, with location set to South Yarra, Melbourne.


Fig 2: Changed Virtual Earth map, with location set to Luangphrabang, Laos.

I’ll post the actual demos another time.

Just a quick note, there’s a lot of links below. You could spend a long long time reading about it.

If you’re interested in Atlas, do download the Hands On Labs and play around with it. There’s a lot there, and there’s also a lot not yet documented fully on the Atlas website.

There’s a whole host of PDC slides available here for those interested.

UPDATE: Also, check out these videos on MSDN’s Channel 9
Scott Isaacs – MSN DHTML Foundation unveiled
Omar Shahine and team – New Hotmail “Kahuna”

And below is the links from the resources slide:

• Ajax.NET – http://ajax.schwarz-interactive.de (Michael Schwarz, Ajax.NET authors’ blog – http://weblogs.asp.net/mschwarz)
• Ajaxian Blog – http://www.ajaxian.com/
• Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications (Original Article that coined the Ajax term by Jesse James Garrett) – http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000385.php
• OK/Cancel (Jesse James Garrett): Why Ajax Matters Now – http://www.ok-cancel.com/archives/article/2005/09/why-ajax-matters-now.html
• BitKraft – http://www.tiggrbitz.com/
• Dare Obasanjo: Moving Beyond the Basics: Scott Isaacs on AJAX Design Patterns – http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=23a58e59-0a8d-43e4-ab18-a6d64ca5be87
• Scott Isaacs: Why Ajax is so 1999? Part 1 – http://spaces.msn.com/members/siteexperts/Blog/cns!1pNcL8JwTfkkjv4gg6LkVCpw!1685.entry
• Scott Isaacs: Why Ajax is so 1999? Part 2 – http://spaces.msn.com/members/siteexperts/Blog/cns!1pNcL8JwTfkkjv4gg6LkVCpw!1713.entry
• Omar Shahine: Fireant (Microsoft FireAnt Project) – http://www.shahine.com/omar/PermaLink,guid,93499451-ec70-40ec-beb1-3789f46630d7.aspx
• SecretGeek: EARWAX anybody?: AJAX and The EARWAX – http://secretgeek.net/Ajax_earwax.asp
• Ajax.NET under sharepoint (Angus Logan) – http://msmvps.com/anguslogan/archive/2005/07/09/56884.aspx
• Alex Bosworth’s Weblog: Ajax Mistakes – http://sourcelabs.com/ajb/archives/2005/05/ajax_mistakes.html
• Additional resources to blog post (Ajax Mistakes): http://alexbosworth.backpackit.com/pub/67688
• Cleaning up with Ajax http://www.builderau.com.au/program/soa/Cleaning_up_with_AJAX/0,39024614,39195723,00.htm
• ASP.NET Spiced: Ajax – http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnaspp/html/ASPNetSpicedAjax.asp
• Omar Shahine: FireAnt – http://www.shahine.com/omar/FireAnt.aspx
• Scott Guthrie: Atlas Project – http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/06/28/416185.aspx
• fiftyfoureleven.com: XMLHttpRequest & Ajax Working Examples – http://www.fiftyfoureleven.com/resources/programming/xmlhttprequest/examples
• Brock Allen: ICallbackEventHandler vs AJAX.NET -http://staff.develop.com/ballen/blog/CommentView.aspx?guid=c35c43f6-5686-40ee-9752-8095a848d821
• Bertrand Le Roy: Fun with callbacks Part 1: What’s in the ASP.NET box? – http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/archive/2005/04/08/397761.aspx
• Paul Glavich: Asynchronous client script callbacks – http://www.simple-talk.com/2005/08/10/asynchronous-client-script-callbacks/
• Luke Wroblewski: Ajax Interface Design – http://www.lukew.com/resources/articles/ajax_design.asp
• Ajax Patterns Wiki – http://ajaxpatterns.org
• Microsoft Atlas Project: http://atlas.asp.net
  More on Atlas:
• Atlas PDC presentation slides and demos (Nikhilk Kothari): http://www.nikhilk.net/Entry.aspx?id=92
• Atlas XML Script: http://www.nikhilk.net/AtlasXMLScript.aspx
• Atlas Architecture Overview: http://www.nikhilk.net/AtlasArchitecture.aspx
• Microsoft Gadgets – http://microsoftgadgets.com/

To all that came to the presentation, thanks for listening!

UPDATE (25/09/2005): I’ve finally found enough time to post the Atlas demo that I did of Virtual Earth here.

Having a strong framework for building and integrating rich, highly interactive components enables MSN to deliver much better (and consistent) user experiences. The Framework provides us with a client-side component model, network stacks, firefox compatibility, and OO language enhancements that allows us to “engineer” rather than ad-hoc script the client.

Many of our goals and work is going to be captured in the Microsoft Atlas effort. Microsoft Atlas, from the ASP.net team, is an upcoming toolset to quickly enable any web-developer to create and build highly-interactive web-sites.

Interesting, it’s probably quite easy to draw many conclusions from that quote, so I won’t. I was actually thinking the other day when browsing the start.com pages whether or not they were using a “version” of the Atlas framework, or if Atlas would build upon previous JavaScript frameworks that I’m sure do exist internally at Microsoft (just an assumption that I made that they would have one already.).

I also noticed via the Ajaxian blog a link to an article on the IBM website entitled “Migrate apps from Internet Explorer to Mozilla“, an interesting article that goes through the various differences between the browsers and how to accomodate for both in your apps. Basically, an article about developing for cross browser compatibility.

Actually, it’s their codename for their new “Web client framework” which will provide us (developers) with tools for developing AJAX style applications.

I think what web developers really want is a really good JavaScript IDE. Well, I do anyway… And i’ve seen lots of posts around to place (mostly web forums) where people are asking questions like “what is the best JavaScript IDE out there?”

JavaScript’s been around for awhile, it’s not going to go away anytime soon.

I think people should really start exploring Object Orientated JavaScript. The way that JavaScript does its’ OO is fairly different from the way say C#/Java etc do OO.

Exploring some of the below articles you’ll get introduced to a term called “prototyping”. If you already get inheritance, then looking at the code here and you’ll get prototyping straight away. Just one of the many new terms you’ll start seeing a lot of when exploring the below articles on OOJS as they call it!

For those that want to get up to speed with OO JavaScript, here’s a few articles.

From Code Project: Part 1 Part 2 and Part 3.

From JavaScriptkit.com: JavaScript and Object Oriented Programming (OOP)

From WebRerence.com: Object-Oriented Programming with JavaScript Part 1 Object-Oriented Programming Part 2

JavaScript can be a mess if you don’t write it well, which is basically the same any other piece of code you don’t write well. It’s a mess and a headache to go back to and debug later.