Articles filed in category 'Frameworks'

Consider this hypothetical: You need to track different ways it is permissible to contact a customer.Or perhaps there are multiple attributes you wish to attach to an entity. Further, perhaps you want to define new attributes that can vary from entity to entity. From a database perspective, this can present a thorny problem. Fortunately, indexers in C# provide an elegant solution to the problem. In this article, I will show you how to use indexers to expand an organizati...on’s data and at the same time, have minimal impact on an organization’s database structure. I will also show you how to incorporate this technique with NHibernate and how to verify your results with the MBUnit and TestDriven.net unit testing frameworks.See More

Increasingly, users have come to expect that applications they use continue to respond while the application processes information in the background. To achieve the best responsiveness, you need to build applications to be as asynchronous as possible. In the past, creating asynchronous operations consisted of passing callback delegates or lambda expressions to indicate what action to take when an action completes. These can lead to an unmanageable mess of spaghetti code.

In this article, you will create a CODE Framework RESTful service and an iPhone application from scratch. For the client side, you will utilize XCode (yes, you’ll need a Mac!), which uses Objective-C as the primary language. This article won’t teach you the language; you need to know the basics of Objective-C. Even if you don’t know anything about it but want to code right away, read the article “Building a Twitter Search Client on iOS,” by Ben Scherman, available for al...l CODE readers in the Xiine application for Windows, Android, and iPhone. For the database, you’ll use any instance of SQL Server 2008. The service will be written in C#, using the latest version of CODE Framework, available on http://codeframework.codeplex.com, where you will find not only the download link, but also a lot of useful information.See More

In the last issue of CODE Magazine, we took a look at CODE Framework’s WPF features. This time, we are going to look at a completely different area of the framework: Creating business logic and middle tiers as SOA services. SOA is the cornerstone of many modern applications, creating systems that are more maintainable, flexible, and suitable for a wide range of scenarios, ranging from Windows to Web and Mobile scenarios using a wide variety of technologies, and outperfor...ming conventional multi-tiered applications in a range of metrics. Using CODE Framework, it also becomes easy and extremely productive to build SOA layers.See More

In prior articles, I have shown how to create WPF-based client applications using the CODE Framework and the default themes it ships with. This is a great way to create applications quickly yet make them very reusable and maintainable. However, using the default themes is just the tip of the iceberg. CODE Framework’s theming system is completely open and the default options are just that: defaults. And it turns out to be surprisingly straightforward to create your own themes.

The CODE Framework WPF features (based on MVVM and MVC concepts) have become very popular amongst .NET developers, thanks to ease of development paired with a high degree of freedom, control and reuse. Another CODE Framework module takes these concepts and extends them into the domain of documents and printing. Many applications use third-party reporting products to create print and report output, and those products certainly have a good reason for existence and aren’t e...ntirely replaced by the CODE Framework Document features. However, the CODE Framework Document features can replace some functionality that would otherwise be handled by reporting packages, and in addition, the CODE Framework Document features add a significant number of new features including the ability to create more naturally flowing documents and printouts and use those not just for print, but also use them as interactive user interfaces.See More

The CODE Framework is an open-source application framework by the makers of CODE Magazine. It is entirely free of charge. It covers a wide range of features that can be applied altogether or individually in an À la carte fashion. All of these features revolve around a single concept: Building advanced business applications in a productive and maintainable fashion while maintaining great application architecture. In this article, we are focusing on a subset of the CODE Fr...amework, specifically the components used to build WPF applications using the MVVM and MVC patterns.See More

Some time ago, a client called me and asked me to tell him when someone had logged in and out of the network. It was a reasonable request but it presented a challenge for which I had to develop a quick solution.

The Microsoft® Sync Framework is the new framework and runtime for adding synchronization, roaming, and offline capabilities to applications. It supports peer-to-peer scenarios, works with devices and services, and is agnostic of data types, stores, and protocols. In this article, I’ll cover the high-level vision for the platform as well as the enabled scenarios made possible by the framework for developers, ISVs, and OEMs.

Derick outlines how to achieve the benefits of low coupling, high cohesion, and strong encapsulation. He also shows how the five S.O.L.I.D. design principles can get you there.Most professional software developers understand the academic definitions of coupling, cohesion, and encapsulation.However, many developers do not understand how to achieve the benefits of low coupling, high cohesion and strong encapsulation, as outlined in this article. Fortunately, others have cr...eated stepping stones that lead to these goals, resulting in software that is easier to read, easier to understand and easier to change. In this article series, I will define three of the primary object-oriented principles and show how to reach them through the five S.O.L.I.D. design principles.See More

It seems you cannot turn in one direction or another and not hear about a new JavaScript library or CSS framework that promises to be the silver bullet-to be THE thing that will make web-based application development a breeze. This article will introduce you to Knockout.js (http://knockoutjs.com/). Knockout.js is an open source library (under the MIT License) that is pure JavaScript that works with any existing web framework and every mainstream browser. Further, Knockou...t.js is fully documented with a complete set of online tutorials. What does Knockout.js do? It simplifies the task of building data-aware web UIs through the application of the Model-View-View-Model (MVVM) pattern. Regardless of the business problem your web applications are built to solve, all web applications, and just about every other application for that matter, shares the following characteristics:See More

If you want to develop code that’s flexible, extensible, maintainable, and testable, you’ll want to read Paul’s article about some basic things to keep in mind before you start.