AJAX & ATLAS (Kyle Baley)
Finally!  THE MAIN EVENT!!  The *RUMBLE* in the *JUNGLE*!!  This is actually the presentation I've been waiting to see.  I love AJAX like it was a secret, *dirty* lover.  

Quick nitpick of the talk before we get things underway:  At one point Kyle said "What sucks about AJAX?" and mentioned that it is impossible to debug and that you can't view the source of a changed file.  Although it requires external tools, you can actually do *both* of these - by hooking up IE to the debugger (obviously going to be the source of another post).  Also, FullSource ( ) will allow you to see the *current* state of the HTML rather than simply the state of the HTML that has been changed.  That being said, AJAX is still sexy and so was this talk.

• "Come Away With Me?"  We start things off with a ballsy Kyle using his music app to expose his love of girly music for all to see.  Possibly foreboding.
• Kyle's shirt is half up on one side and half down on the other - it is seriously throwing me off, man!
• AJAX = all about appearance.  If an application looks like it is performing faster, it "is" performing faster.  Much like the IglooCoder, AJAX is all about percieved performance. 
• Now we see an AJAX-driven view of Kyle's Girl Music.  
• Am I the only one perturbed by a search for "Hand" bringing up a checked off "Can't Stop Loving"?
• AJAX-driven page, as expected appears way faster.  
• Disadvantage of AJAX - no breadcrumb (where have you gone?)  What about bookmarking?
• All right, *FINALLY* - someone who uses DIVs instead of TABLEs for layout!!  Sincerely, seeing this has already made this presentation jump 5 levels of awesomeness.
• One minor nitpick: when Kyle says some might consider DHTML to be a part of AJAX, it's actually AJAX that is a part of DHTML (at least when initially developed by Microsoft).  In the end, it really doesn't matter though.
• Explanation of the actual XMLHTTP call for those who are unaware
• What sucks about AJAX?  (gasp! see above)
•   - Impossible to debug
•   - What is the source?
•   - Very little intellisense
•   - No compile-time help
•   - Browser compatibility  
• So what's so hot about ATLAS?
• The Atlas Script Manager outputs 11,000 lines of Javascript(???)  Man, that does *not* sound like a very nice download.  "Hopefully you've got page caching turned on".  I thought this was supposed to be what was *cool* about Atlas?
• The funny thing about Atlas is that it seems to be building the controls that many developers were needing and building several years back, only that now these are standardized controls from MS (that also output 11000 lines of code...sorry, I can't get over that?)
• Okay, first "Come Away With Me", and now love ballads from Enrique Iglesias???
• Fiddler being shown off - MS tool for debugging HTTP traffic.
• Funny - even though I love AJAX in a quasi-sexual* manner, this part about Fiddler is actually pretty intruiging.  It's like a visualizer for HTTP traffic but blown out all to a ridiculous proportion.
• Wow. Atlas will take care of paged grids and sorting?
• More banjo music playing and Kyle puts on the porn star voice.  Glad I am sitting in the back.  "Yew gots a purty mouth baw"
• These chairs - I believe my backside has just gone numb and we're only two presentations in!
• Best quote: "You can implement this in a day or so and not even tell your administrator!"
• Web service behind the scenes seems a lot easier.
• And we finish with a listing that includes Abba, Sarah McLachlan, and the Cranberries.  
• Okay, no, the *best* quote is "The Atlas Picker - oh Lord".
• Atlas has committed to supporting both Mozilla and IE - of course, I've seen other offerings from MS as of late (e.g. "live") that had this "feature" dropped; however I would assume they would include this if they want anyone to take this halfway seriously.
• Another AJAX framework that will work with 1.1 (www.magicajax.net)
• Question - is ATLAS slower than AJAX?  Kyle: probably, due to the overhead.  ATLAS sends more information to the client and gets more information back than you would if sisters are doing it for themselves!

Concluding thoughts:
I would *kill* to use this at my current contract.  Seriously, if you need a hit on the IglooCoder or something I will get it done in order to get this going!!  I've seen several different attempts at AJAX frameworks in .NET (and even tried to use a couple of them).  The only thing that holds me back is the (once again) 11,000 lines of code that this behemoth is shoving into the page response.  

Also, Kyle's presentation and code will be available on his blog.  I highly encourage any developer who is remotely interested in ATLAS or AJAX to check this stuff out.)

My summary in poetry:
My backside is numb
Non-AJAX is dumb
It blows off my socks
That's how much this pres rocks

But 11K lines
Is hardly sublime
And that didn't quite rhyme,
BUT WHO WRITES THIS BLOG??  SNAP~!

Fin
(*) Okay, fine, sexual. DON'T JUDGE ME!