Wow, I missed this over the holidays but Nikhil announced that a new CTP of Atlas has been released. From what I hear Atlas is going to have a GoLive license from Microsoft in 2006 but it won't be fully released until .NET 3.0.

Some of the changes look really good. The new and improved Atlas scriptmanager control renders out the Atlas script references so you no longer need a bunch of <Atlas:Script> tags on your page.

Also there is going to be better debugging help in this CTP (with even more debugging help coming in the future). Apparently, the script manager is going to detect whether or not debug is set to true in the web.config and run Atlas in release or debug mode based on that configuration setting.

There is a lot more cool stuff but Nikhil does a better job at explaining it than me. In the 2 months since I have looked at it, Microsoft has come a long way in developing Atlas into a better product so check it out and play around with it.

I forgot to mention that Wilco Bauwer has a handy Atlas class browser which is already updated to show the new CTP.