Yesterday I wrote one of those blog posts that I almost deleted instead of posting, but just decided to go ahead and post anyway. After reading through it today and all of the comments here are some more thoughts.

As a number of people have pointed out, Atlas is just a CTP and I am probably expecting way too much from it. I think my expectations were inflated by a number of people telling me how they are using it on their current project and the fact that there is a go-live license. I will reserve judgment on Atlas until it is officially released, I can admit there has been a great deal of improvement since the first time I used it (wow, almost a year ago now).

Secondly, Brian Madsen was wondering why on earth I was using a CTP release in a production environment. Basically we are just trying out Atlas on a small number of pages in the application, removing Atlas will probably take less than a day. Whenever I use a beta, alpha, or CTP release I always do so with caution. Atlas is not a central part of the application and prototyping it out on a small number of pages did not introduce any un-reasonable risk to the project considering we are still four months away from production.

Lastly, ScottGu wondered what the precise issues I was having were and what I did to try and resolve them. Most of the issues we found were either acknowledged bugs or were things we ended up writing custom javascript to get around. Here is a sampling of some of what we encountered:

• State Information has been corrupted errors (in IE)
• If you include an UpdatePanel with a ComponentArt grid the callbacks from the grid don’t work anymore. (I haven’t tracked this one down yet)
• The AutoCompleteExtender has a frustrating limitation of a hard-set signature. It has to be (string prefixText, int count). In our application we also needed to pass along the selected value of another dropdown. (a good example would be you want to select a car manufacturer and then limit the results returned to cars under that manufacturer) In this case we basically had to re-implement using our own solution.
• You can’t set the focus to the autocomplete textbox when the page loads. (also haven’t had time to track down the cause of this)
• Runtime errors with autocompletes and update panels (workaround here)

Based on the issues we have had we are going to switch over to another solution for this project, but I will definitely re-evaluate Atlas when it is released.

-James