Atlas March CTP is Live

Atlas makes it possible to easily take advantage of AJAX techniques on the Web and enables you to create ASP.NET pages with a rich, responsive UI and server communication.  The March Atlas CTP (Customer Technology Preview) is released with a "go live license" which means developers can deploy applications built with this technology on production servers.  

There is a ton of great information (download, samples, videos, walkthroughs, etc) about Atlas at http://atlas.asp.net  so instead of duplicating that information I am going to focus on the few things that are relevant to you as a hoster:

• Atlas has friction free deployment, so developers with FTP access to the server will be able to deploy the Atlas code and their applications the same way they would any other ASP.NET application.
• The Atlas code will run in Medium trust. However, a primary usage of Atlas is to build mash-ups which typical involve calling web services on remote machines.  To enable web service calls, outside of the requesting application, requires a modification to medium trust.  Find out how to do this by reading Enabling WebPermission in Medium Trust.
• Some of the samples distributes with the Atlas CTP rely on the XMLField in SQL Server 2005. As a result these samples will not function properly on SQL Server 2000.
• The Building Mash-Ups with Atlas walkthrough explains how to enable the .asbx file extension on IIS.  Check out the Tunneling the Bridge Calls with .axd Extension article for an alternative solution with the .axd extension.

Please let us know if you find any additional issues with Atlas running in your hosted environment.