Ezequiel Jadib’s Blog

As Glenn mentioned we published a new Page Flow Guidance Package in WCSF Contrib.

What’s in the new PageFlow?

• New stand alone PageFlow guidance package that works on Visual Studio 2008. This guidance package does not require WCSF
• New XmlPageFlowProvider that does not depend on Windows Workflow Foundation
• Migrated PageFlowWithShoppingCart Quickstarts to Visual Studio 2008
• Updated Dependencies to GAT/GAX 1.4

You can get the bits here.

Note: We are not shipping the documentation in this release because we are still working on it.

Some time ago, I wrote about a new WCSF sample application we had published in WCSF Contrib. 

Now I’m writing again about this application because we’ve just published three new articles that describe the work done in each of the modules.

If you are interested in this sample, you will find the new articles very useful.

Articles

• Kick off
• Product Module - NEW!
• User Module - NEW!
• Admin Module - NEW!

Download E-Commerce Catalog

Enjoy!

I’m happy to announce that we have just published in WCSF Contrib a sample application developed with Web Client Software Factory 2.0.

The application is an "E-Commerce Catalog" and is intended to:

• Show recommended practices in incremental Web development.
• Demonstrate how a WC-SF project can be faced and developed.
• Demonstrate how Web Client Software Factory 2.0 assets help to solve common technical challenges.

I recommend you to read the kick-off article in where you will find:

• How the application was designed incrementally.
• The rationale behind our technical decisions and implementations.

These are some of the technical challenges that the E-Commerce Catalog application addresses:

• Modularity
• Unit testing Web Solutions
• Authentication
• Authorization

You can find more about the technical challenges in the kick-off article.

I hope you find this new sample useful. Any feedback will be appreciated.

And stay tuned!. More articles will be published soon.

Download

I downloaded the last WCSF drop and I started to play again with the Guidance Package.

The first thing you are going to notice after register the guidance package is that the registration is not replacing Web Client Software Factory June 2007 version. This happens because the new guidance package has a different Guid and is going to work side-by-side with June 2007 version.

Figure 1. The new September 2007 Guidance Package

Let’s see what’s new in the guidance package regarding ASP.NET AJAX support.
Note: You need to download and install ASP.NET AJAX Extensions in order to use this new features.

As soon as you create a new Web Client Software Factory September 2007 solution you will see a new option on the wizard.

Figure 2. The Enable ASP.NET AJAX Support new option on the Create Solution wizard page.

Note: If you don’t have ASP.NET AJAX Extensions installed this option will be disabled.

As you imagine, this option enable your new solution to support ASP.NET AJAX by adding the required configuration statements to the web.config. Also add a reference to ASP.NET AJAX Extension assembly.

Figure 3. Some of the statements that are being added to the web.config.

Figure 4. The website a has reference to System.Web.Extensions assembly.

Another little gem is the possibility to enable an existing (WCSF or not) non-AJAX solution. To do this you just have to run the new recipe Enable Ajax.

Figure 5. The new Enable Ajax recipe.

This will enable your solution in the same way I have explained before.

I hope you find this useful. Enjoy this enhancements and provide us feedback.

To get a deepest knowledge about WCSF vNext and what the team has been doing, please check the following posts:

• Announcing Web Client bundles by Glenn Block
• What has the Web Client Team been doing recently? by Michael Puleio
• Web Client vNext, what’s our focus? by Glenn Block

After got valuable feedback of the community, we decided to change some things of the previous version.

In this new version we can define the scope of the service we are registering, allowing thus register global and module services. This version is a replacement of the previous one.

Here are the breaking changes:

• Remove the services section from the config file (We added this section in the previous version).
• Change the modules section:

  Change this:

<sectionGroup name=”compositeWeb”>
    <section name=”modules”
             type=”Microsoft.Practices.CompositeWeb.Configuration.ModulesConfigurationSection,
             Microsoft.Practices.CompositeWeb”/>
   <!– Other config sections here –>
</sectionGroup>

To this:

<sectionGroup name=”compositeWeb”>
    <section name=”modules”
             type=”CompositeWeb.Extensions.Configuration.CustomModulesConfigurationSection,
             CompositeWeb.Extensions”/>
    <!– Other config sections here –>
</sectionGroup> 

• Changed the way of how register the services in the config files. Now we have to put the services node into the module node:

  <module name=”Customers” assemblyName=”ModuleQuickstart.Customers” virtualPath=”~/Customers”>
      <services>
          <service registerAs=”MyInterfaces.IService1, MyInterfaces”
                         type=”MyImplementations.Service1, MyImplementations”/>
          <service registerAs=”MyInterfaces.IService2, MyInterfaces” scope=”Global”
                         type=”MyImplementations.Service2, MyImplementations”/>
          <service registerAs=”MyInterfaces.IService3, MyInterfaces” scope=”Module”
                         type=”MyImplementations.Service3, MyImplementations”/>
       </services>
  </module> 
  

Note: By default the services are registered as global services.

• Change the Global.asax file to inherits from CompositeWeb.Extensions.ExtendedWebClientApplication

<%@ Application Language=”C#” Inherits=”CompositeWeb.Extensions.ExtendedWebClientApplication” %>

Source code

• You can get the source code of the CompositeWeb.Extensions project by downloading the WCSF Extensions v1.0 release located at the new Codeplex WCSF Extensions project. If you face problems building the solution, make sure the references to the assemblies are correct.
• Important: The code is provided “as is” without warranty of any kind.