The blog of dlaa.me

It wasn't as easy as anybody claimed it would be, but my team just published the 61020 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit (formerly the "Atlas" Control Toolkit)!

What's new in this release? Umm, pretty much everything. :)

Kidding aside, we probably touched just about every line of code in the Toolkit during this release. Why? Well, because we sim-shipped (simultaneously shipped) with the new ASP.NET AJAX v1.0 Beta, a pretty fundamental set of changes to the framework formerly code named "Atlas". The many changes are detailed on their web site, so I won't bore you with the details here. Suffice it to say that their changes impacted the Toolkit in a major way since we build directly on top of them. Some of the specifics of the Toolkit migration process itself are detailed on Shawn's blog, so I won't repeat them here, either.

What I *will* do is highlight our new controls for this release:

• DropDown: Provides a dynamic drop-down functionality
• MutuallyExclusiveCheckbox: Allows pick-lists of mutually exclusive values
• ValidatorCallout: Adds great client-side UI to ASP.NET validators

I'd also like to single out four of our contributors who made significant contributions to the code that's part of this particular release. To be sure, we have other contributors who've been tremendously helpful in numerous ways and who we'd be lost without. However, these four folks made specific contributions to this release that were very much appreciated. My new best friends are:

• Ronald Buckton
• Alessandro Gallo (Garbin)
• Paul Glavich (Glav)
• Pierre Lagarde

And thanks to *everyone* who helped get this release out the door!

As usual, the release notes outline a bunch of other changes we've made. Please take a moment to read about the new stuff. While you're at it, sample any of the controls right now (no install required). Then browse the project web site and download the latest Toolkit so you can start creating your own controls and/or contributing to the project!

If you have any feedback, please share it with us on the support forum (or email me)!!

I'll be presenting the AMS302: "Atlas" Control Toolkit Unleashed: Creating Rich Client-Side Controls and Components session at the Microsoft ASP.NET Connections conference on November 7^th in Las Vegas. The session's description is:

The "Atlas" Control Toolkit is a set of controls and extenders designed to help ASP.NET developers easily integrate rich client UI features into their Web applications. As a community effort, the Toolkit contains controls written by Microsoft and non-Microsoft developers who have joined forces to create a powerful, shared-source library for all to use. You will learn how to integrate Toolkit components into your application as well as get an idea of how easy it is to create "Atlas" extenders using the Toolkit.

If you will be attending the conference (or otherwise in the area) and would like to get together, please let me know and we'll make plans!