I found this while I was searching for some ASP.NET “Atlas” stuff on microsoft site. Watch out the videos by none other then Nikhil Khotari, one of the creators of “Atlas”. Although this introduction is fairly simple but it's worth watching Nikhil.
Check out following link to download the videos, links and other stuff.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5cc5ce52-45b7-4c64-992c-4f0fbc8c8221&DisplayLang=en
Watch this link for streaming video of First look
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdntv/episode.aspx?xml=episodes/en/20060119AtlasNK/manifest.xml
I just have to say this time that era of rich web applications is here to stay !