Atlas Prerequisites and Installation
The best way to begin to understand the power of Atlas is to use it. All you need to develop Atlas applications is a JavaScript-enabled browser on the client and an ASP.NET 2.0-enabled web server. A text editor is sufficient to create Atlas applications. However, especially when applications get more complex, an IDE with additional features like IntelliSense, code completion, project management, debugging, and WYSIWYG functionality can be real 5imesavers. In the world of ASP.NET 2.0, the most widely-used editor comes from Microsoft in the form of Visual Studio 2005.
Installing the IDE
The good news is that, although the full versions of Visual Studio 2005 are usually your best bet, the web-centric Express edition of Visual Studio 2005—Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition—also fully supports Atlas.
Tip
For the sake of simplicity, we will refer to Visual Web Developer as VWD throughout the rest of this book. By VWD we mean both the Express edition and the full version of Visual Studio 2005. The web development component of VS 2005 is also called Visual Web Developer (you can see it during installation of Visual Studio), so VWD is the most generic term for creating ASP.NET 2.0 applications with a Microsoft IDE.
If you do not already have an IDE, install either Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Web Developer Express Edition. For the latter, go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/vwd/download, where you will find a web installer that ...