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Using Atlas (MS Ajax Toolkit) with CF, and getting CF / Atlas example working

Note: This blog post is from 2006. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.
Have you wondered about using Microsoft's Atlas tookit with CF? You can. It helps, though, to recognize that the toolkit is composed of multiple parts, one of which is a purely client-side toolkit and which can certainly work with CF. There's even sample code to demonstrate it.

Before I point that out, let me clarify that Atlas has also been renamed recently and is now named in ways that recognize the different parts. The client portion is now called the Microsoft Ajax Library.

There's a demo zip showing CF/Atlas integration available at the blog of the MS Developer who presented it at CFunited, Brad Adams. As discussed in the blog and comments, just unzip the file into your web server root. Assuming you leave it named AtlasCF, you need not change the code--except for one thing.

If you have CF Debugging turned on, the app will fail to work (without any message). Of course, the debugging will cause his CFM page (called from the Atlas client) to send the big load of HTML debugging info at the bottom of its output--and his Atlas client obviously won't be expecting that.

The simple solution is to drop:

<CFSETTING ShowDebugOutput="no">

into the application.cfm.

Sadly, he's got comments turned off so I can't offer this there, though I have emailed him and hope he may update the blog entry.

Perhaps others out there are also doing CF/Atlas integration. If so, drop some comments here for others who may be interested to hear.

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Comments
Sorry. had a typo in the code above on the first iteration of the entry. You couldn't see the CFSETTING code due to an error in the HTML code tags. Fixed now.
Also, if you're using CFMX DevNet Edition, most AJAX examples won't work because of the use of the meta tag that automatically gets appended to the output. A great Windows tool for monitoring AJAX responses is Fiddler (http://www.fiddlerto...) It's an HTTP proxy that is very easy to set up and use and is very useful for debugging AJAX operations.
Thanks for that, Dan. I'm a big fan of Fiddler, too, and wrote about it last year on the BD blog. Fortunately, I've seen more and more use it since then. Those who have not--do look into it, or Firebug for FF, among others.

As for the DevNet edition's watermark, I had not heard about that problem, but as I looked into it, I see what you mean. Interesting. I just posted a comment on Steven Erat's blog with a thought:

http://www.talkingtr...
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