Yesterday’s Morning Coffee was canceled on account of barfing. For all the gory details (you have been warned), check out my wife’s blog.

• Only 12 responses to the State of the Union were posted as I write this. Dunno why, but I was expecting more. Maybe this whole Web 2.0 thing is overblown a bit! 😄
• Speaking of the State of the Union, is it just me, or did anyone else find it odd that the Scooter Libby trial started the same day?
• AtlasASP.NET AJAX 1.0 is done. Lots more on this from Scott Guthrie’s blog. While I’m not personally that interested in ASP.NET AJAX itself, two things strike me as interesting in this release. First, we’re shipping all the code for this. The client side JavaScript library, the Control Toolkit, even the server-side components. Second, it’s nice to see the Developer Division shipping something this significant without waiting for the next release of Visual Studio. Here’s hoping that both of these two trends continue.
• Rich McCollister pointed me to the XmlProviderLibrary. Bad on me for not looking harder.
• Windows Live Writer is pretty cool, but it is missing one feature that I needed twice Tuesday. While embedding images in a post is cake, there doesn’t seem to be a way to embed non-image files. You know, like the ColorConsoleTraceListener Project or the Live Search for Chartity Search Providers. I’m guessing the infrastructure to post images and files would be identical, but there’s no UI interface for it. I checked out the WLW SDK online and found the ISmartContent.Files.Add method, so I’m guessing it’s doable. But there’s no such animal on the Live Gallery. I wonder why nobody else has built this yet? Is this really that unique a request?

As I wrote this morning, I’m in training this week. The instructor (who I wrote earlier is “pretty good”) is Jon Flanders. I didn’t recognize his name, but I did recognize his Atlas based WF Designer that he released a month and a half ago or so. It’s a cool piece of work so it’s doubly cool (for me anyway) that he’s teaching this class.

Seven months and one job ago, I wrote this about AJAX toolkits:

The network effect that Dion doesn’t consider is the component ecosystem phenomenon that Microsoft has a ton of experience with. Old school VB, COM/ActiveX and .NET have all had large ecosystems of components and controls evolve that extend the functionality of the baseline development platform. There’s no reason to believe that won’t happen with Atlas. I think it’s wrong to describe Atlas as a monolith or self-contained or enclosing. It’s an extensible baseline platform – i.e. the baseline functionality is set down once at the development platform and the ecosystem can extend it from there. Sure, overlapping extensions happen (how many rich text editor components are there for ASP.NET?) but at least they all have basic compatibility.

I bring this up now because I saw on Shawn Burke’s blog that they’ve shipped the September release of the Atlas Control Toolkit. There are now 25 different controls (they had 10 in their first release). But there’s something more significant than the addition of 15 controls overall:

Slider is just a super-useful little control.  There are so many times when you want to let users use this type of UI.  Another great thing about Slider is that it’s a 3rd party contribution, from Garbin, who did a great job on it. (emphasis added)
[Atlas Control Toolkit September Release]

I just wanted to brag that I called this 7 months ago.