I'm a casual developer and typically use VB.Net when writing solutions, as its what I'm most familiar with. Though I aim to learn other languages in the future, such as C#, its very much on the back-burner and so here we are.
One of my current projects would benefit greatly from a service-bus architecture, so I have been researching potential options. Some of the more obvious choices, such as Azure Service Bus, are out of the question, as my application will not have access to the public internet once operational. Looking in to options that could be run within a local site I've stumbled across both nServiceBus & MassTransit as front runners.
My current stumbling block is that all the documentation and sample code seems to be written for C#. My question would be if the frameworks require programming to take place in C# exclusively, or whether I can utilise another .NET language (such as VB) instead. If this is indeed possible, I wonder if anyone could point me in the direction of some sample code? Of course I can gradually reverse engineer the C# if necessary, once I know if VB development is even possible (or practical).
Thanks,
Chris.
I am taking a hand in development for the first time and trying to teach myself some things, and chose to start with ASP and Visual Studio. I have a rather simple question to ask... I generally search and search and search... but I don't know what the proper term/phrase is for what I'm searching for.
Assumptions: Visual Studio 2013 (not express), asp.net mvc5 with bootstrap(3.1.1) is what I'll be using.
Two part question: what is the phrase/term to use when searching for an answer to part two? data grid? data fill? something else?
The second part of my question is what are the most commonly used methods of creating and filling a table with data from an existing database? Do people almost always just have to hand code everything or are there great tools out there?
So far I only found...igniteUI and I haven't actually read the website to see what it's about yet. I want to be able to design something... maybe using bootstrap or boilerplate.. and then create tables and fill them with tables. I've only ever made static sites. Anything that has some kind of GUI that lets me build these tables and and direct certain data types to specific table columns and rows would be a major plus, as I could compare what I just did with the code that was created... and then I could learn to make cleaned up handcoded versions myself. this is how I learned web design, I figured I could learn SOME parts of development the same way.
As I said above, the reason I am asking this question is because I do not know what any of the proper term(s) for what I'm describing and wasn't sure where to start.
Welcome to SO.. kind of a loaded question and somewhat opinionated, but I have 2 spare cents I can offer.
In the end, it depends what data you are trying to present, and what you want that user to do with that data. With HTML, anyone can create a simple table and present some data (aka TR and TD tags). What's this good for? Showing tabular data. What's this not good for? Anything interactive...
OK, so then what do we use instead? Again.. depends what you're trying to allow the user to use, AND if you have any existing resources in place. For example, jqGrid is your front runner in late bound, jquery enabled sortable\editable data presentation. ExtJS is also a popular scripting library, and they have some tools as well.
But that's late bound, javascript enabled stuff.. what about things that are already bundled into ASP.NET? Well, you have the gridview and listview at your disposal. Both are nice because they allow some quick and easy ways to connect to structured data, and if you're using some of the more popular data stores, such as SQL server, you even get drag\droppable connections (aka, less coding). Telerik has been in the game a long time, and for some cash, you can get some pretty advanced tools.
Again, all opinionated stuff. ASP.NET has some very nice things out of box, but nothing is perfect.. all of the items mentioned above I have used at one time or another, and they've been a great foundation for starting my applications. But at the end of the day, I always had to take what was given to me and add\edit functionality to get what I ultimately needed.
Hope this helps...
I'm writing my first WinRT app for Windows 8 in C#/XAML managed code and I obviously have to handle the UI in the different sizes and orientations that could occur (FullScreenLandscape, FullScreenPortrait, Filled and Snapped).
Most people seem to suggest handling the UI changes through the Visual State Manager in XAML, however me being more comfortable with writing the code-behind rather than XAML, I thought I would simply handle the Current_SizeChanged event with a switch statement for each of the states.
I tried both ways and both seem to work for me (though the VSM was decidedly more work - at least for me).
Can someone tell me why I should use the VSM over code, or what benefits I would receive?
It's a good question, and certainly one that entered my head when starting WPF & WinRT development. Having coded C# projects for years, it seemed a strange concept to start building UI logic in the Xaml (which is usually more lines than C#, but also more declarative).
In actual fact (if you don't mind me saying) I think we can abstract your question out to 'Is there any benefit to writing UI code in Xaml over C#/VB.net?'.
Let me give you an example, in work I'm on a project team with several developers, and several graphic designers. The designers are pretty awesome at laying out that Xaml, and creating a consistent feel for the application (something I can't say I would be that good at) - but will have little idea when it comes to writing web-services and Data Access layers - which is our job as developers. And that's how it should be right?
Well whenever you start writing a lot of View/UI related logic in C#.net, this can lead to all sorts of problems. The designers all of a sudden can't focus on the Xaml at hand, and must get up to speed with OO programming. In our project this isn't that much of a concern, as the designers are actually pretty competent developers (must have been all that UI code I forced them to understand last year :)) But what I think it boils down to is a 'Separation of Concerns' at a job description level. If we take the paradigms associated to WPF I think things like Databinding 'guides' developers down a road where they create separated, testable UI and Business layers - the same way that the nature of Xaml allows for a very declarative approach to writing UI where the View Logic is created and maintained in a very readable manner without getting too much into the nature of OO programming.
So, coming back to your question - No, I don't think there any immediate benefits, and if you come from a mainly .Net background to write a lot of these things is Xaml can be little tricky. However, if you are in a team of people - or if you find best-practices a very important factor in development, then writing View related code such as Visual State manager configuration in Xaml is the way to go.
One last point - you'll notice I used the terminology 'View related logic' a lot. This is because it's widly viewed that writing UI related code in code-behind is acceptable (if not best-practice) but sometimes due to the nature of the WPF or WinRT framework you are dragged down this route for some functionality. However, if you are writing business logic in the UI files codebehind this is viewed a particular no-no. This breaks the 'seperation of concerns' and can make testing very difficult. If you are following the MVVM pattern (as many WPF or WinRT projects do) then this is what the ViewModel is responsible for.
My team is currently working on windows forms project using VB.NET. We are curently focused on functionality and the UI seems to very basic (if you drag and drop from the toolbox to your windows forms)
Is there any recommendations or standards when it comes to UI for windows forms development? I want to ensure that the client gets a great UI.
I appreciate your support.
Yes, it's a simple standard: make sure that you follow the Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with "simple". In fact, in many cases, simple is good!
Your focus should be on making things easy, intuitive, and conform to user's expectations. Modeling your app after other applications, particularly those included with Windows, is a good way to make sure that you're on the right path.
Breaking new ground is dangerous territory; leave that to the big shops like Microsoft. Even new UI concepts that have panels of user interface/experience experts behind them like the Ribbon are slow to be accepted and even slower to be adopted. This isn't where a small software shop wants to be. There's no advantage in being out on the leading edge here.
The recommendations you'll inevitably get to use third-party controls are well-meaning, but ultimately misplaced. There's nothing wrong with the built-in controls and a lot of reasons to prefer them.
Once you've got a functional UI that conforms to the standard guidelines for your platform, the next step is real-world testing with actual human users who have never worked on any aspect of your application.
If they like it and they find it easy to use, then you know you're on the right path. I've never heard a user complain that something looks "too simple". Google Chrome is a huge hit precisely because it's simple. Remember that you're not designing a web page here. Desktop applications are very different.
In fact, it blows my mind how often questions like this one get asked here. Why do desktop app programmers spend so much time wishing that their app looked "cooler"? These are often the same developers who complained loudly because Visual Studio 2010 switched to WPF, broke a lot of their standard expectations, and got a lot slower, with little noticeable benefit. Sure, it looked cooler (unless you didn't like the color blue), but there was little in the way of functionality that the UI change alone was responsible for. Look at the apps you use every day. Do you really pine for a more whiz-bang UI? Or do you appreciate them and integrate them into your workflow because of how they work—because they conform to your hard-learned expectations of how a standard Windows application should work?
Make your app work like that.
Believe it or not, UI is very important to the end user. Its good you focus on functionality first, but when its done, make sure the user will have a good experience with your system. Make it as easier as you can, keep in mind that every user does not know everything about softwares, dont let him/her make a mistake, the look and feel must be very nice from the user's point of view, its not important to the system but it is to the user.
I use to use third party controls that manage the look and feel (DevExpress) you can try but if you are going to try some third party controls, you will have to do it at beginning of development, because the functionality may change.
I hope it can help you some.
Regards.
I spend a lot of time (actually too much time) developping back-office applications whose main purpose is content management and web application configurations. Here is how I can describe these apps :
- Made with PHP
- Using a MySQL or Postgres or SQLite database
- Made of a lot of pages and features
- Very simple features, mostly data CRUD (create+read+update+delete into the database)
- Mostly made of forms
- UIs are usually quite simple (html + css + very basic javascript)
All of the data access code in these apps relies on a library I developped years ago and re-use every time I can. This part is not time-consuming.
What's time-consuming is the UI part, and mostly designing data-lists and forms. Using a WYSIWYG editor would make a lot of sense here, except those I tried (Dreamweaver, Frontpage, Expression, Eclipse, ...) don't really make it much faster, because the generated code is often bloated, and these tools can't rely on custom libraries such as the one I made and use.
I figured using a Web Tookit could be another way to spend less time developping these tools. So before I spend too much time looking for the perfect toolkit, I would appreciate your opinions and experiences on that kind of matter.
Disclaimer : I'm not looking for advices on how MVC is the way to go and how CodeIgniter/Zend/WhatEver is the framework I should use. My question is not about the frameworks or the design patterns I should build my applications upon. My question is about using the right tool to make simple web-applications development faster, and their code even more re-usable.
Is there an awesome web-application RAD tool I don't know about ?
Which toolkit do you use for simple but form-heavy web applications ?
Are there good, light, non-bloated, reliable toolkits written in PHP ?
Thanks in advance !
Edit : Not getting much feedback so far :/ I'm aware that my question is very broad, but I'm sure lots of people work on the same kind of projects I'm talking about, and have improved their productivity by using toolkits such as GWT, Wicket and such. Tell me about it, please :)
September 28 edit : Thanks everyone for the interesting answers. What I'm looking for is not covered by any framework I could try in the past months. PHP is probably not the best language to use for my vision of RAD, but since it's a language I know very well, and since I don't want to spend too much time learning Python as well as I know PHP (for the moment), I decided to do it by myself. Everytime I have a specific need for a widget, I code it in the most re-usable way...so far so good :)
I might open-source that toolkit at some point, and will let you guys know.
The PHP project I've been working on the past few years is a lot like that. Heavy on forms, heavy on server-side logic, but lots of redundant form coding. Too make matters worse, it wasn't all forms, sometimes we actually need to do fancy layout (even just doing a tree control is a pain without a library), and the home-grown nature of the UI meant that I would be battling browser quirks from start to finish.
So, I got to thinking about what a better architecture would be. We needed very powerful form controls, rich grids, rich trees, advanced layout, and we needed to migrate to that gradually. None of the PHP frameworks seemed to fit. Then I took a step back and realized that it didn't have to be PHP, it could be javascript also. We already had a requirement on javascript, so it was fine to go the distance with it. First I looked at the smaller libraries, jquery, prototype, but it became obvious that they didn't do enough. So I looked at Dojo, ExtJS, YUI, all the really heavy javascript toolkits, and settled on ExtJS as having the best controls.
We had a UI structure that relied heavily on iframes, a navigation frame on the outside, application frames inside that, feature frames inside that, and so on. What we ended up with is we're migrating those from the outside in. It's all becoming ExtJS, and it's all living in the same page. The server-side code is kept the same, but it's migrated into web services. At the same time we've integrated zend framework, and are porting some of the stuff you really shouldn't do home-grown to it, like authentication and translation.
The end goal is being able to write just the business logic without having to mess with all the boilerplate. It's too early to know if my approach will pan out, but I think my message would be to be critical towards your code base and decide which parts you want to keep writing yourself, and which parts you want to outsource to a library.
Please try http://agiletoolkit.org/. I think it's what you need. Results with minimum time/code.
At the moment I'm using a solid forms class to render HTML forms with client- and server-side validation, and a database class to write the SQL. I can get a CRUD section of my admin console up in about 10 lines of code. I wrote those classes myself so I can re-use them in all my projects. Hopefully that gives you some ideas?
I would stay away from WYSIWYG tools personally.
I'm testing NuBuilder.com, I discovered it does
within days, at first looks promising. If you take a look
please send me your feedbacks!
Maybe adopt or create an "app-based" infrastructure like Django's? In Django's case, the community has created some powerful baselines like Pinax.
I think Symfony may be the way to go because, like your apps:
it's written in PHP
ORM based on Propel/doctrine (so you can use MySQL, Postgres or SQLite)
Architecture and patterns used will help you with complex applicatons
You'll find tools helping you to debug, document, and test your application
Forms creation, validation, l10n & i18n, testing, AJAX is easy (forms within symfony explained here, check it out)
prototyping you webpages while developing your application is easy
Other tools/practices implemented in the symfony framework that will make your life easy:
full configuration using YAML syntax (easy to read and understand)
the scaffolding feature generates for you a simple CRUD interface for editing your data.
you don't have to worry about coding form sanitization, security, caching, ACL; configuration is needed, but no heavy coding.
The only downside, you need to read some documentation to understand "the symfony way of doing things". But hey, a good framework is 20% code and 80% good practices.
My point is, even if you don't want to use Symfony for your project, you should check its features and built-in tools, because that's the kind of tools you want for your project.
I started using Django and it has very helpful features, esp. the built-in admin (for general CRUD stuff) and really great form-handling code & widget rendering. I'd suggest taking a look, even if you don't plan on using python, just to get an idea.
You mentioned that you don't want advice on "Use X framework", since this is more about RAD & UI/forms than system architecture. But I've found that a good framework helps just as much with the UI & forms side of things as it does the architecture. That means that while frameworks are great for big projects, they're also very helpful in reducing code redundancy. I started creating my own helper functions in PHP that I would copy from app to app that would automatically render an HTML form based on a few parameters. Even after a lot of work, this was very rudimentary compared to what Django offers, and basically I was writing my own framework.
I think you may be looking for a GUI-style tool to help, but you might find that a good PHP framework is more helpful in this case. At the very least, have you tried creating your own helper libraries? I know those helped me a lot.
Simple Example:
function renderInput($name, $value="") {
print "<input type=\"input\" name=\"" . htmlentities($name) . "\" value=\"" . htmlentities($value) . "\" >";
}
function renderRadios($name, $value="", $choices=array()) {
for ($choices as $cvalue) {
print "<input type=\"checkbox\" name=\"" . htmlentities($name) . "\" value=\"" . htmlentities($cvalue) . "\" " . ($cvalue == $value ? "checked" : "") . ">";
}
}
And build up from there. Stupid things like this tend to make form creation just that much faster. A good framework will blow this out of the water. And I'm sure the above has some typos, I haven't done PHP in a little bit.
If this isn't what you're looking for, could you add some more to the question? I'm curious.
Although you're asking for PHP + MySql, I would like to recommend you to give a try to the OutSystems Agile Platform.
You can create a simple CRUD app in less that 10 minutes and grow it as you go to a more complex system.
Download the Community Edition for free at www.outsystems.com.
Best,
Not sure but looks like Tibco General Interface (http://www.generalinterface.org ) is what your looking for.