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.