As the developer of Visual WebGui it is obvious that I don't like the way ASP.NET is taking us and as I have been faced with the shallow saying WebGui can be replaced by Atlas I would like to point out why I think Microsoft Atlas is good for enhancing existing ASP.NET applications but is by no means a way of developing new web applications.
I was trying to create my ClassBrowser demo in Microsoft Atlas to compare those technologies and after five hours of hard work I still was searching how to do it. What I understood is that I could not do that with out writing “glue code” in javascript and in me prospective that automatically made Microsoft Atlas an incomplete solution providing me a half baked solution. I was willing to ignore how the application looks as WebGui comes with a specific goal in mind, I was willing to ignore the ASP.NET designer which had me writing HTML code to layout my application, I was willing to ignore performance issues but I was not willing to ignore the time it took me to try to create the application and still getting no where.
For that purpose anyone how can show me a working class browser application that he wrote in up to 3 hours of work and here I am including the time it took me to get the data out of the reflection API, I would be more then happy to see it and publish it here.