I loved Atlas and Now I'm out of Ajax.

I downloaded Atlas Control Toolkit on 10/19/2006 around 3:00am and guess what? Around noon which was 9 hours later, Atlas Control Toolkit became "Ajax Control Toolkit" which is now updated and based on "Ajax v1.0 Beta".

Well, at first glance, I was tempted to download the new release and then I decided to read the new documentation first and I noticed this in this installation instruction

note

The installation package installs the assembly (Microsoft.Web.Extensions.dll) in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC). Do not include the assembly in the Bin folder of your AJAX-enabled Web site.

Did I read what I just read?

My applications and the products I'm working on are geared towards customers in hosting environments, meaning I will only use functionalities that works in a "medium-trust" environment. This essentially means my products are shot out of the sky for maybe the next one year, at least not until the  Ajax Library goes official and is widely adopted by hosting companies and/or rolls into .NET v3.0.  If that is the case, how many hosting companies will install .NET 3.0 in the next one  year?

Okay, Atlas itself was an "unproven" framework and to use it in any products that I'm trying to develop was not such a good idea, but hey, I spend a lot hours to get around its limitations and I'm very confident to say my products worked well with Atlas.

Now, Ajax Beta is installed into GAC, this means even if I want to follow up, I don't have a practical reason to do so. At least with Atlas, I could merge into my products and deploy them to customers... and now? I can't do it anymore.

For early adopters like myself, this is truly a bad news.

For now, I will stick with what Atlas has to offer which is not a bad set, pretty much offer what I need at this time with lots of things still left to be desired.  I'm just not sure in the next one year, what kind of stuff will come out of other Ajax frameworks like Dojo, scriptaculous, etc and give my competitors a leg up, especially if the Ajax v1.0 kept improving with the things that I want, and yet, I can't use it. It's as if someone offered this super delicious meal in front of me and I can't eat it.

I'll have to keep my eyes peeled for other frameworks now, so I don't miss out anything important.

BUMMER!

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