Corey Roth [MVP]

I installed the new Decemeber CTP Atlas VSI today and so far I am pretty impressed. I have only done a quick sample, but it is very impressive and easy to use. In a previous post, I talked about the UpdatePanel, but I did not realize at the time how easy they have made it to use.

What the UpdatePanel does is allow you to put any kind of regular server side control (i.e.: textbox, buttons, gridviews, you name it) and it will automatically intercept those controls postback events and convert them to callbacks. This means that you do not need to have any specific knowledge of AJAX or of how callbacks work in order to dynamically update a portion of the page.

The way it works is simple. First start by turning on partial rendering by passing a value of true to the EnablePartialRendering attribute like in the example below.

<atlas:ScriptManager ID="ScriptManager1" EnablePartialRendering="true" 
runat="server" />

Once you have registered it start by creating a new UpdatePanel. In this panel, you specify a ContentTempalate. It is in there that you can put any server side controls that you want including registering events as normal (i.e.: button click, etc.). There is also a triggers element that allows you some more customization of when to intercept postback events.

Here is an example of it in use. In this case my button click event fires the event handling method defined in the code behind that simply appends some text to the string in the textbox and writes it out to a label. All of this happens without a postback occuring.

<atlas:UpdatePanel ID="UpdatePanel1" Mode="Always" runat="server">
  <ContentTemplate>
    <asp:TextBox ID="TextBox1" runat="server" />
    <asp:Button ID="Button1" runat="server" Text="Submit" 
OnClick="Button1_Click" />
    <asp:Label ID="Label1" runat="server" />
  </ContentTemplate>
</atlas:UpdatePanel>

That is all it takes to take advantage of this in Atlas. If you are interested in downloading the Atlas CTP, you can get it at the link below.

Atlas December CTP

Visual Studio 2005 Updated Web Project Wizard

What is cool is that they created the concept of an updatable region. This tells the page that this part of the page can be updated. You simply use the new UpdatePanel control and put in regular ASP.NET server side controls (i.e.: GridView, or whatever).

Another cool thing is that the ability to do timed refreshes of a section. So that way you can have a part of the page update automatically without posting the entire page back. Say, goodbye to sites using meta refreshes.

I checked and this is not out yet, but it should be by the end of the week or early next week I believe.

You can read more about the new features from Nikhil.

1. Major Update to Atlas - They are adding a ton of features.
2. Updated Migration Utility (VS2003 -> VS2005) - Should see this early next week.
3. Web Application Project Refresh
4. Web Deployment Project Update - We are using this in Beta form now.  It seems to work pretty well.
5. Profile Provider for Database Tables - This sounds cool.  It allows you to integrate existing profile data from external sources.
6. Hosting upsize tool for SQL Express - I think this makes it easy to migrate SQL Express databases to real SQL Servers.
7. CSS Adapters for Controls

You can read about all of this here.

Scott's Blog

1. Master page controls Init event.
2. Content controls Init event.
3. Master page Init event.
4. Content page Init event.
5. Content page Load event.
6. Master page Load event.
7. Content controls Load event.
8. Content page PreRender event.
9. Master page PreRender event.
10. Master page controls PreRender event.
11. Content controls PreRender event.

This is a bit complicated, but hopefully this reference will help in the future.  More info can be found here.

 <configuration 
xmlns=" http://schemas.microsoft.com/.NetConfiguration/v2.0">

<configuration>