I recently got an email from one of my contacts at Microsoft announcing a new technology
designed to make AJAX-style development easier. I've included the relevant portion of the email below:
Hi John,
It's been a while since we chatted, and I wanted to fill you in on what you can expect to see as one
of the core themes of this year's Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Sept. You'll hear
about the latest developer innovations in the user experience and how Microsoft is providing an
integrated developer platform that spans user experience scenarios from HTML to AJAX to Avalon.
Over the last few days, Microsoft has been discussing some of the new technology capabilities in
Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 that will be unveiled at the PDC later this year.
The technology, codenamed "Atlas," will provide a Web client framework for
AJAX-style development. The technology is designed to make developing with AJAX easier,
as well as making the AJAX technologies accessible to a much larger set of developers.
A developer preview is slated for the PDC.
"Atlas" functionality includes:
- Provides an extensible, object-oriented JavaScript framework for client-side browser development
- Runs in any modern browser
- Deployable with any Web app
- Connectivity via xmlhttp and WS-* Web services
As a part of the PDC this year, Microsoft also plans to discuss how the company is making big
investments in advancing the user experience with Avalon, particularly as it relates to offering
a unified developer platform for applications, documents, and graphics which will vastly improve
a computer's visual experience - everything from user interface on the screen to document formats
to printer output.
It looks like we'll have to wait until the PDC to find out more, but it's nice to hear that
something is in the works.
