Section 14.1. Installing the Toolkit

14.1. Installing the Toolkit

Before you can create custom Atlas controls, you need to add the toolkit controls to your development environment. The Atlas Control Toolkit is 281vailable on the Atlas home page at http://atlas.asp.net/default.aspx?tabid=47&subtabid=477. Up-to-date documentation can be found at http://atlas.asp.net/atlastoolkit. The toolkit is provided in the form of a self-extracting ZIP archive (see Figure 14-1). Click it, and it prompts you where to install the toolkit.

Figure 14-1. The Atlas Control Toolkit installer

Then the script FirstLaunch.cmd (part of the archive) is launched automatically. Here is its one line of content:

 LocalWebLaunch.exe SampleWebsite\WalkThrough\Setup.aspx /root:SampleWebsite 

If this looks familiar, you are right: the ASP.NET Development Server that comes with Visual Web Developer and Visual Studio ships with the Atlas Control Toolkit as well. The documentation provided with the toolkit runs based on ASP.NET 2.0, making it also possible to see the sample controls in action. Figure 14-2 shows this documentation web site in the browser.

Figure 14-2. The local Atlas Control Toolkit documentation

Alternatively, you can open the AtlasControlToolkit.sln file that's included with the self-extracting (SFX) archive in Visual Studio. If you use Visual Web Developer Express Edition to launch the .sln file, you will get an error message, since the solution contains a Visual C# project that Visual Web Developer Express Edition does not support. However, the web site portion of the solution does open and you can run the solution, ignoring the error message.

The next step in using the Atlas Control Toolkit consists of adding the required libraries to an existing Atlas-enabled web site. Open up the Toolbox in the Design view of the IDE. Then, right-click the Toolbox and click Add Tab. Name the new tab Atlas Control Toolkit.

Right-click the new tab and click Choose Toolbox Items. Add the Atlas Control Toolkit assembly, which is the file AtlasControlToolkit.dll that resides in the SampleWebSite\Bin folder of the files extracted from the Atlas Control Toolkit archive. This adds the controls within the toolkit to the project, as Figure 14-3 shows. Afterward, the Toolbox has some new entries that can be seen in Figure 14-4.

Figure 14-3. Adding the Atlas Control Toolkit to the project

Figure 14-4. The new Toolbox items