ASP.NET has made the Web a powerful platform for enterprise application development. ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 extend that power dramatically. But Microsoft developers are already hard at work on the next version of ASP.NET. And this time its not just server-side code. A new technology, code-named Atlas, is in the works that will make the client side almost as powerful a programming platform as the server side. In addition, Atlas provides a number of new server controls that leverage the power of client script to provide a deeper, richer AJAX-style user interface experience.
But you can do more than simply read about the new technologies. Microsoft has already made a beta version Atlas available for you to playing with. All you need is Visual Web Developer Express 2005 or any edition of Visual Studio 2005 and the Atlas download which you can access at http://atlas.asp.net.
In this video you discover how to add Atlas server controls to your application and how to put them to use to make Web service calls back to your application and update the page without doing a refresh. Specifically you’ll discover the AutoComplete Extender control that provides a customized drop-down list that provides more and more specific results as the user types, much like the one used in Google Suggest or in GMail search.
After viewing the video, download Atlas and then download the source code for this demo to begin creating your own AJAX-style applications with Atlas!