Brian H. Prince

Nikhil and the Atlas team have pushed some new bits at http://atlas.asp.net. They have made an amazing jump forward with their platform. Some of the big changes: - Partial updates with the update panel control. This lets a trigger action on the client do a virtual post back using callbacks. On the server side you have the rich event and stateful object model you are used to. The server then renders only the part of the page that maps to the update panel in question. This could potentially lead to a postback-less web app. That wouldn't necessarily be my goal, but I would like to get rid of past backs that are on the same page. - ScriptManager upgrade: The SM has had a major upgrade. You can run it in a new 'runtime' mode that provides the OOP features, without all of the atlas controls and other stuff. That is awesome, because one of my favorite features of Atlas is how they turn JavaScript into a real OO language. The SM can also be used to create references to services, so...

The Thursday night presentation to CONDG went really well. The only slow part was where we (Michael and myself) relied on too much typing during the code demos. We are presenting the same talk at CINNUG this Tuesay, and plan to modify how much code we write on the fly. I have found this great Atlas resource on the net. Wilco Bauwer has posted a tool that uses to reflection to help document the framework. This has been a great help to me in trying to learn Atlas, and get it to do what I want. It also helps in findig the holes in the current bits. For example, there isn't a server side service manager component yet. You still have to use the client side control. Wilco also some great Atlas postings on his blog as well. I will soon publish the slide deck, code, and resource URLs on the related user group sites soon. When I send them out to the UG owners, I will post them here as well. I have found some conflicts when you put a hyphen in the ID attribute of the atlas:panel server con...

I will be speaking at CONDG (Central Ohio .NET Developers Group) on 12/8/2005, from 6-8p. We will be going over Atlas, and looking at some code. I will be bringing along Michael from my team, who is an amazing young developer, to be my code monkey. Drop by if you have time. -bhp

TDD is the hot new topic. Actually, it has been around in one form or another for several years. With the release of Visual Studio 2005, I expect to become even more of a hot topic. When I introduce TDD to professional developers in my shop, they tend to think of it as a drag at first. This is when I usually ask them how they developed their last personal project. They always talk about how they wrote on feature, and made sure that worked, and then moved onto the next piece in a very organic way. They grew the architecture as needed, and refactored to streamline the code. They didn't sit down and write 50 pages of technical documentation (although they may have drawn some big boxes and arrows.) TDD is merely writing tests to validate the features you want to implement, before you write the code. The green light of TDD is what tells you when you are done. Which is hard for some developers to know. We call them 'gold-platers' around these parts. Test Driven Design is a great ...