I decided after working a bit more with ATLAS that the client-side needs a LOT more documentation. Some cooperation with other javascript libraries would also be nice.
A properly working dataservice is lacking.
I’ve turned back to the server side controls. The start of this whole mission was to keep the freetextbox control on a page and still don’t have full postbacks. Upload pictures with progressbar was going to be a plus.
How to upload files from within an update panel is something that I will come back to in the future but it isn’t going to be pretty.
The things I’m about to write I will wrap in a control later (when I have time) for people to download
Anyways you wrap your freetextbox in an Iframe and it works. Don’t add a scriptmanager to your iframe page.
Put a hiddenfield on your main page and in the ClientSideTextChanged event of the freetextbox control you update the hiddenfield on the parent. If you wrap it inside a control then I suggest you add a property to the control that holds the Text variable 
That’s about it, easy isn’t it.
