On FireAnt, Atlas and AJAX

Omar Shahine has written a really interesting peice about the plumbing behind the new hotmail beta.  Its a great window in to the architectural and development approaches inside Microsoft, and inside MSN as well.

Key points I saw:

  • The new Hotmail system is based on .Net for the Data and Business layer
  • The MSN Team wrote FireAnt to simplify AJAX development
  • FireAnt sparked some great conversations inside Microsoft
  • They've just done a Channel 9 video which is currently in the editing phase :-)

What I'm not clear on is whether FireAnt was what kick started Atlas...

Check out his blog post to read the full story.