Blaine Wastell - patterns & practices client architecture guidance : Prism

We need your feedback on Web Client Guidance

blaine — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 19:09:03 GMT

Last week we posted our 2nd public drop for the Web Client Guidance project. We have over 1000 downloads of our first two drops which is great. We now need to your thoughts on how we are addressing the challenges of responsiveness and modularity which is why we created a discussion topic on Codeplex to get your feedback.

We are only as good as the feedback we receive, so let us know how we are doing.

Drop 2

As background, this last drop made the following changes from the first drop.

Reference Implementation

Upgraded to MVC2 Beta.
- Consistentely using RenderAction to render views (No longer using ActionFilters+RenderPartial). See SongDetails, EditProfile and Home pages.
- Removed jQuery validations and replaced them with new custom validator attributes. Attributes are used in ViewModels and by JavaScript validation methods. See Register and EditProfile pages, validators are located in the /ViewModels/Validation folder and JavaScripts are in the CustomFormValidation.debug.js file.
Added modularity infrastructure.
- Different supplier interfaces (IServiceSupplier, IRouteSupplier, IInitializable, and so on) are used to provide new Routes, Services, Initialization, and Endpoints to the main application. Registrars (ServiceRegistrar, EndpointRegistrar, RouteRegistrar, etc) are used for registering those items during the application startup (See global.asax). These allows to develop each feature in a decoupled way.
- An agnostic DI approach was used by using the CommonServiceLocator project in all infrastucture classes and interfaces. Particular implementations (such as the UnityControllerFactory and Service suppliers) are usign a UnityContainer.
- The modularity feature is not complete yet, and will be more stable in the next drop.
A new MyLibrary module was Introduced.
- The module provides a controller. See the LibraryController.cs for reference.
- Views for the Library controller are shared using MVC Areas. See /Areas/MyLibrary folder for reference.
- The module exposes a contextual rendering endpoint when the song search results are displayed. The “Add to Library” link is displayed only when this module is loaded.
- The module registers a shared service. See the MyLibrarySongDetailsProvider.cs. The Shell provides the SimpleLogger service.

QuickStarts

Enhanced the WebForms RI QuickStart. Song reviews can be added and deleted (Authorization). A preview is shown in the song results. This QuickStart is still in progress.

Documentation

Added the Script Loading document that leverages Webforms ScriptManager and MVC ScriptLoader information and considerations.
Added the UX Patterns document.
Added Webforms: Top Ten Tasks for improving responsiveness (very early draft).

Another Prism Class Available Jan 11 – Jan 14

blaine — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:57:37 GMT

I have been asked recently where to find training on Prism. The good news is David Platt is offering another Prism Class from January 11 through January 14, 2010 (I cannot believe that I am writing 2010). You can go to www.programprism.com to get signed-up for the class.

Prism release for Silverlight 3.0

blaine — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:19:42 GMT

We just posted a new version of the Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight (Prism 2.1) to run on Silverlight 3.0.

This minor update includes:

Projects refreshed to target Silverlight 3.0
Changes in DelegateCommand and CompositeCommand to no longer hold on to CanExecuteChange handlers.
The TabRegionControlAdapter was updated to set the context for the Header item to retain the same behavior as Prism 2.0.

You can download the bits from here and you find more details about the changes on the MSDN page.

If you are interested in a customer that is using Prism, check out my recent blog post.

Customers using Prism

blaine — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:10:45 GMT

Over the past several months, I have been asked who is using Prism. While I know lots of customers that are successfully using Prism, I cannot share their names.

The good news is I have a number of customer quotes that I can share based upon a study from Nucleus Research and I also can share that Fit BPO created a club management system that is used by UFC Gyms. The club manage system uses Prism, WPF, Silverlight, and DevForce.

Ask: If you are using Prism on a project let me know how it is going – both good and bad.

Nucleus Research conducted a study on the usage of patterns & practices and one of the areas they researched was Prism. Here are some of the quotes from the research.

“If you didn’t have Composite Application Guidance you would spend a week figuring out what it would have told you to do, then lose a few months trying to write the things Composite Application Guidance already writes — or you’d shortcut it. But where you would really get stuck is after v1. But you’re in a much better position with Composite Application Guidance, because it’s designed for change so every change is not going to cost you months.”

“Composite Application Guidance saves you tons of code and when you go back later and try to change the application it’s very loosely coupled so you can change it. If you just write what was initially asked for you can paint yourself into a corner. With Composite Application Guidance it’s very loosely coupled and you can just extend it. If you have any composite application and you’re not sure how it may evolve, you should invest a few days in learning Composite Application Guidance. If you’re going to have an application that lasts any period of time, it’s definitely worth it.”

For more information check out the report.

Fit BPO

Fit BPO is using Prism (Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight) to create a client in both WPF and Silverlight. The project team used Prism’s guidance and tooling which allows them to share code between WPF and Silverlight. Additionally Fit BPO is using Prism to create modular applications that can respond to change.

For more information on the project check out the following videos and Web pages:

	Watch David Smiling (Project Manager) and Ward Bell of IdeaBlade demo and discuss the application. (You can also click here to download the video)

	Read the Customer Profile.

	Watch Microsoft's John Stame and Ward Bell on using WPF and Silverlight on the UFC Gym project. Watch Ward discuss their usage of Prism and how they reused code between WPF and Silverlight.

Listen to Elegant Code’s recent Webcast on Prism 2.0 with Bob Brumfield and Blaine Wastell

blaine — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 18:50:56 GMT

David Starr and Scott Nichols of Elegant Code recently interviewed Bob and I regarding Prism 2.0 (aka Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight). Check it out for a good walk through of Prism, the differences between Prism 1.0 and Prism 2.0, and the differences between CAB and Prism.

Prism training is available from Rolling Thunder

blaine — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 00:20:50 GMT

David Platt from Rolling Thunder is offering a training course on Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight on May 18 – 20. David provides training for both Prism and CAB/Smart Client Software Factory. Check it out if you are looking for training.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post we also have videos that walk through Prism concepts.

Have you taken the Prism survey

blaine — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 19:30:40 GMT

We (the patterns & practices client team) need you to take the Prism survey to tell us how we are doing. If you have evaluated or used the Composite Application Guidance for either WPF or Silverlight, go take the survey now. The survey is less than 20 questions and should take less than 10 minutes to fill out.

We use this information to understand where we need to improve the guidance for the next release of Prism. If you have ideas for what is needed in the next version of Prism, reply to my blog or send me an e-mail letting me know. I also want to hear your stories about using Prism on your project. I want to hear what went well and what did not go so well. We are only as good as the feedback we receive.

So go take the survey now and tell everyone you know about the survey so we get the feedback. I used to live in Chicago and we had a saying with regards to voting. We would say “Vote Early and Often”. You got to love the Chicago politics. As an fyi, the survey is for either Prism 1.0 or Prism 2.0.

VB QuickStarts and How To’s Now Available for Prism

blaine — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 17:44:00 GMT

We had a number of customers ask for Visual Basic Versions of the Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight. As Bob stated in his blog, we are excited to announce that QuickStarts and How To’s are now in Visual Basic. This provides guidance of how to use Visual Basic with the Composite Application Library which is still in C#.

You can download the guidance from the Microsoft download center. Give us your feedback on this new guidance from the patterns & practices client team.

Update to Prism 2.0 Available on Download Center

blaine — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 01:35:28 GMT

After we published the Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight - February 2009 release, we discovered that the Composite Application Library (CAL) test projects do not build successfully with the new Silverlight version 2.0.40115.00 (GDR1) so we decided to fix this issue. For details on the issue see the knowledge base article.

Additionally we had a report that the Active view in TabControl behaves differently in Prism 2.0 than Prism 1.0. We decide to fix this give the fact that we already decided to update the download. For details on the issue see the knowledge base article.

The new download is available from the same location as stated in my blog post that announced the release. You can verify if you have the latest version of the self-extracting archive by examining the Digital Signature timestamp it should read 'Tuesday, February 24, 2009 12:00:07 PM'.

Based upon requests from customers we created a PDF version of the documentation so you can print it. You can download the PDF file from here.

Roadmap for WCSF

blaine — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 09:01:00 GMT

A number of customers have asked about the future of the Web Client Software Factory. I want to announce that we are starting to plan for the next release of the Web Client Software Factory. We plan to start the project in the spring of 2009 and plan to deliver this next version with Visual Studio 2010. I need your feedback as to the scope for this next release. The overall process for this release is the following.

Announce intent for release and ask for scope requests
Obtain feedback from you and other customers to create candidate scope list
Publish survey to prioritize candidate scope
Build vision/scope from prioritized scope
Start project & deliver the project (if only it were this easy

We will take feedback from the following sources for the release:

Obtain feedback from my blog and Michael Puleio's blog

Obtain feedback from www.codeplex.com/websf

Obtain feedback from advisory board

Obtain feedback from direct customer discussions

We are considering a number of new features for Web Client Software Factory. This list is to get the discussion started but it will not be the final scope which is why we need your feedback. We will not have time to implement all of these features and I am confident that you will provide many other ideas that are not on the list.

List to start the discussion:

Unity for a container
Composite support for MVC
Support for Web pages through dynamic data
Eliminate the use of a base class similar to what we did for Prism
Allow library to be pluggable so you can use your own components including the container
Support for Silverlight controls on your Web pages
Allow Web Client Software Factory controls to be reused with SharePoint
How to distribute logic between layers of the architecture
Improve performance of CWAB

I need your feedback on what you think we should focus on. I also need your help to build a list of customers that are using the Web Client Software Factory. I constantly have customers that are asking who else is using it. Additionally it is helpful to have this list to put the business case together for how much budget we should spend on this next release. So please help me build my list of customers.

As for support, we will continue to provide support for WCSF through our Codeplex site.

Prism 2.0 Drop Available on Codeplex

blaine — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 21:21:33 GMT

Erwin Van Der Valk posted a blog entry on the latest Prism 2.0 drop. You should go check it out. Over the last few weeks, I have received feedback asking why we do not have the entire prism library available for Silverlight. The answer to this is we are in the progress of completing the effort. Similar to other patterns and practices projects we are porting the library as we go. This past iteration we focused on:

Top down UI Composition: new approach in Prism 2.0 that simplifies the ability to create views
Event Aggregator: porting
Service Locator: to use IServiceLocator interface, which is part of the CommonServiceLocator implementation http://www.codeplex.com/CommonServiceLocator.
RI Port: this is in progress

The plan going forward is as follows:

Finish Top down UI Composition
Finish modularity: we currently do not have directory sweep and config base modularity
Commanding
Support additional technical concepts: navigation, validation, data management: query data and send updates to the server on Silverlight clients. We will consider these assuming we have time.

As we take on these additional technical concepts we will port the RI and QuickStarts to the new library and Silverlight. The differences between Silverlight and WPF are causing us to making changes in the core library. Our goal is to allow you to maximize (within reason) the amount of code reuse between Silverlight and WPF which requires changes in the core library.

Have you downloaded the latest drop and provide us feedback? Your feedback keeps us focused on the right things.

Announcing 6 new patterns and practices releases

blaine — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 21:28:52 GMT

The patterns & practices team just published 6 new releases in the last two weeks. Ajoy discusses the releases on his blog. The new releases include:

Enterprise Library v4.1
Unity Application Block v1.2
Distributed Agile Development white paper and Agile showcase
Application Architecture Guide v2.0 (Beta 1)
SharePoint Development Guidance v1.0
Acceptance Testing Guidance

Check out the new guidance as there is truly lots of new and useful guidance.

CAB to Prism Comparison Available on Codeplex

blaine — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 19:17:14 GMT

Our Composite UI Application Block (CAB) customers have been asking for comparison documentation between CAB to Composite Application Guidance for WPF (Prism). You can download the guidance from here. This documentation helps you understand the difference between the libraries to help you plan your migration to Prism.

This figure provides a comparison of CAB and Prism. One of the big items to understand is what happened to work items. The documentation provides a lot of content on this issue.

Table of Contents of the Guidance

Introduction
Intended Audience
Why Migrate from the Composite UI Application Block to the Composite Application Library?
Moving from the Composite UI Application Block to the Composite Application Guidance
- Application Structure
- Application Startup
- Loading Modules
- Where did the WorkItems go?
- Workspaces and Regions
- Providing Metadata to a View
- Presentation Patterns
- Registering Services
- Wiring Views and Services Using Dependency Injection
- Event Broker
- Commands
More Information
Appendix
- Emulating WorkItems Using Controllers with Scoped Containers

Check out the guidance and let us know your thoughts. We will take your feedback into account before we publish the guidance on MSDN. Thank you in advanced to your feedback.

Training Class Available for Composite Application Library

blaine — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 18:47:43 GMT

We are excited to announce that David Platt is now offering an online training class on Composite Application Library (CAL) on October 1st through 3rd. You can sign-up here.

As background, David has successfully training many customers on the Composite UI Application Block which he has offered for several years. We have received very good feedback on his past training course. David has been involved with Prism/CAL since the beginning. So if you are considering using CAL on your next project, David provides a good way to get started.

Scope for Prism 2.0

blaine — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 21:58:25 GMT

In my previous post, I mentioned that we planned on creating guidance for Composite Silverlight applications. David Hill just blogged on our plans for Prism 2.0. From this survey we heard you wanted guidance on:

Multi-targeting controller, presenters, services, and models for both Silverlight and WPF
UI Composition for Silverlight
Modular Development for Silverlight
Data access

Based upon this feedback we decided to create guidance that will help you create Multi-targeted Silverlight and WPF applications and Composite Silverlight applications. We plan to use the existing Prism...I mean Composite Application Guidance for WPF as the starting point.

Based upon your feedback, we decided to guidance on SharePoint Intranet Development. This includes help with solution architecture, solution development, and packaging and deployment.

Elevator Pitch:

Target Customer: Primary: Silverlight Professional Developers (Includes Architects); Secondary: Human Designer

Statement of Need: Build new multi-targeted Silverlight and WPF client applications maintained by multiple teams (composite application).

Product Name and Capability:

Prism...Composite Application Guidance for Silverlight
Reusable components, guidance, automation and samples for developing composite WPF and Silverlight applications
Enable cross-targeting of applications for WPF and Silverlight easier.

Key Benefit:

Provides infrastructure for developing and maintaining WPF and Silverlight composite applications
User Interface components are dynamically composed
Application modules are developed, tested and deployed by separate teams
Allows reusable components across WPF and Silverlight applications

Focus Areas of the Guidance:

Multi-targeting:

Developer needs to reuse controllers, presenters, services, and models across Silverlight and WPF: Must Have
Developer needs reuse unit tests across Silverlight and WPF: Delighter
Developer needs to reuse validation across Silverlight and WPF: Delighter
Developer needs reuse UI elements across Silverlight and WPF (styling to views): Delighter

Composite Application Guidance for Silverlight

Developer needs guidance on creating a Composite User Interface for Silverlight: Must Have
Developer needs guidance on creating modular application for Silverlight: Must Have

Line of Business Guidance for Silverlight

Developer needs guidance on how to query data and send updates to the server: Delighter
Developer needs guidance on how to create validation rules: Delighter
Developer needs guidance on how to authenticate and authorize users: Delighter
Developer needs guidance on how to cache data on the client: Delighter
Developer needs guidance on logging and exception handling: Delighter

Note that the Must Have's we plan on addressing. The Delighter's we will complete as many as we have time which of course could be none. Give us your feedback on the scope. Are we tackling the right set of challenges?

As an fyi, David Hill recently joined the p&p team and we are really happy to have him on board. I have had the opportunity to work with David in many different roles over the last 5 years. David played an advisor for some of our early Smart Client work which included the Offline Application Block and CAB. He also helped us write the Smart Client Architecture and Design Guide. More recently David was an advisor from the product team for Prism 1.0 and played a big role in helping us simplify the experience of adopting Prism. We are glad that he will be "pig" on Prism 2.0 for those that understand the pig and chicken analogy from SCRUM.