So the last couple weeks, I’ve gotten the chance to play around with the Atlas bits and during that time, I’ve come across a few“gotchas” that aren’t documented anywhere that I’m sure people would love to know about…

• You can attach into Page Methods just like Web Service Methods in the declarative syntax by using pageMethod instead of serviceMethod. When doing this, there is no need for defining the URL.
• When binding properties from pageMethod’s or serviceMethod’s in the declarative syntax, you should set the dataPath to “response.object”. I’ve been told that this will be changed in the future, to make it easier to get the data.
• If you’re using Page Methods, you should be aware that the current state of the form (including ViewState) is posted to the server. Not only that, but the entire life cycle, minus Render, is taken place (Page.IsPostback == true). While it makes it easy to get form data, it can be inefficient if your form has a lot of data. To circumvent this, you can register page as being a Web Service which will, in turn, have no context
  
  Page_Load:
  Microsoft.Web.Services.WebServiceManager.RegisterWebService(GetType(), this);
  
  Javascript:
  Namespace.PageName.MethodName(OnWebRequestComplete);
• If you want to do anything relating with page or service methods, you currently have to write the declarative XML-Script yourself. There’s currently not an Atlas control that interacts with page or service methods.

With that in mind, here’s some resources that I’ve found invaluable while working with Atlas…

• Nikhil Kothari - Blog | PDC Slides and Demos | Architecture Overview
• Wilco Bauwer – Atlas Class Browser | Bindings | Page Loading
• Atlas Quickstart Tutorials

So, make sure you download the latest bits (uninstalling any older versions first – which actually means just deleting the ZIP files contained in “~\My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Templates\ProjectTemplates\Visual Web Developer\[CSharp,VisualBasic]”) and giving the latest CTP a whirl. Here’s some notes on the latest drop if you’re interested in the change list.