Microsoft has released the June CTP of Atlas. You can download it here.
Nikhilk has posted a blog entry describing the core new feature of the CTP; Dynamic UpdatePanels. This is by far the biggest new feature of the CTP (and the last 6 months) and provides a completely new pattern of development for server controls and websites in general that want to take advantage of partial postbacks. I’m totally stoked about this new feature as I’m sure all other Atlas developers are, and want to thank Eilon and the rest of the Atlas team for listening to the early adopters cries and responding. I’m sure there are going to be pitfalls and areas where the new Dynamic UpdatePanel still doesn’t do exactly what I need it to do, but it’s a step in the right direction. I’ll play around with it in the next few weeks and post an entry or two sharing any insights I glean. I just wish that we weren’t so far along in our real Atlas project that taking advantage of it at this point is probably going to cost too much.
Other than the Dynamic UpdatePanels, one feature that I’m really going to like is the ability to see the generated JS code for a service proxy within the page that contains the service proxy. This has been a problem for us as we tried to debug the web services contained within the ScriptManager and I’m excited to have this new ability.
One thing I’m a little disappointed in is that there is no new documentation in the docs section of the Atlas site. Just from reading Nikhilk’s blog entry there seems to be a lot of new server side classes that we’ll need to understand in order to take advantage of the new features. I’m sure that some client side code has changed too. I’m not too sure if MSFT plans on updating the docs for this CTP, but it sure would be nice.