Microsoft Atlas beta release needs a new development approach with Ajax

he new Beta of Atlas has been released and that it isn't called Atlas anymore but ASP.NET Ajax. Lots of changes have been introduced, including the renaming of the $() function to $get() to allow it to work with other Javascript libraries. Maybe it's not quite Beta quality, says Rick Strahl in his recent post entitled More MS Ajax Pain.

The truth is we're all still learning how to build, debug, test and support Ajax applications. See the various development tips from Ajax framework developers on how to debug applications festooned with Ajax widgets. New abstraction, inderection and other plumbing will make it easier to develop, but harder to debug and productivity is bound to go down before it goes up. It's been a long time since I've had any direct insight into Microsoft's internal development practices, but I have to believe they are struggling to find qualified Javascript programmers just like everyone else, just as I'm sure they're struggling to extend their unit, system and regression testing processes to cover the far more intricate logic on the browser.

At the end of the day, it looks to me that MS's approach of incrementally improving ASP.NET will be just good enough to allow them to capture the biggest market share for .NET Ajax. But TibCo GI, Echo2 (when the .NET version comes out), etc., all look to have more interesting offerings, IMHO, even for big corporate players who want to stick to .NET, especially if the productivity of their developers goes up.

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