Atlas and strong typing

I have just returned from Microsoft PDC 2005, and I must say that it was marvelous.  Being there was worth every miserable second on those flights :).

The hottest thing for me was the new AJAX framework for ASP.NET -- Atlas.  Shanku Niyogi gave an overview session on Atlas that covered the potential uses of the framework.  Nikhil Kothari continued with a session on building Atlas components with server and client side examples.  Nikhil has posted an overview of the framework architecture on his blog.  You can download the slides of Shanku's presentation here, and Nikhil's -- here.

I found it a bit odd at first that some people in the audience were concerned about the need to write some JavaScript in order to take full advantage of Atlas.  "Dude, where is my type safety?" seemed to be the major concern.  "How do I debug problems with wrong object types?" and "Do I get IntelliSense?" are usually the ones to follow type safety.  It looks like most of the ASP.NET developers are afraid to write JavaScript. 

Nikhil Kothari demonstrated his web development helper Internet Explorer add-in that helps in debugging most of the JavaScript errors and assured us that we are to see good scripting development tools from Microsoft.  While the development helper was really impressive I still don't think that debugging tools and IntelliSense helpers are the most important tools we need for JavaScript development.  What we really need is a testing framework.  Why would I need a compiler that would check the types of the objects I pass to methods if I can run the tests and see that for myself?  In fact I have found it easier to write tests in languages with dynamic types, and easy testing is the most important feature for any language or framework.

I am using jsUnit in my projects -- it has allowed me to test for browser incompatibilities by running the same suite of tests on different browsers.  jsUnit is open source, so I guess the right way to go would be to contribute a set of adapters or testing extensions that would help us in testing Atlas components.  I will most definitely have to look into that once I get my hands on the Atlas betas.