Mariano Szklanny’s Blog

As Blaine already announced, we have published the Web Client Software Factory documentation on MSDN. After so much work spent on the docs, it is great to see them standing there. I hope it will help users find what they need quickly, and to evaluate the factory’s content before downloading it.

Much has been mentioned about the new features the WC-SF February 2008 release includes. However, there is no much detail about what has changed as far as documentation is concerned. Since I was part of the docs team for the factory and the bundles, I thought that sharing some thoughts with the community could be a good idea.

So What is New?

Most of the efforts in the February 2008 release -regarding documentation- were targeted to include the bundles’ documentation within the factory’s documentation. This was an interesting challenge because the documentation was already large, and bringing in more content implied that it would grow even more, potentially making it harder to digest. Moreover, we wanted to stick to what we have learnt from previous releases and that we verified with the bundles: for most users, small packages of guidance are easier to read and understand than a large set of documents.

The approach we followed this time was somewhat innovative (we didn’t do this neither in SC-SF nor in previous releases of WC-SF). On one hand, we decided to bring in the bundles docs as individual guidance sections that could be read integrally and that would provide value by themselves, keeping the reader focused on the specific technical concept she/he wants to learn. This way, for example, if you want to learn about validation you know you will reach all the validation-related topics from within the Validation Guidance section.

You will find these individual guidance sections inside the new Technical Concepts node. The sections basically map one to one with bundles. They are:

• Modularity Guidance
• Validation Guidance
• Search Guidance
• Autocomplete Guidance
• Views Testability Guidance (MVP)

On the other hand, (and here comes the innovative part) we duplicated topics across the documentation. For example, the Model-View-Presenter topic can be found within the Views Testability Guidance section, and within the Patterns for Web Client Applications section. By doing this, we allow users searching for Web development patterns to discover this topic, and we allow users looking for views testability guidance to find it too, without having to jump from one topic to another topic miles away.

To warn you that you are reading a duplicated topic, we included a short note at the beginning of each duplicated topic.

This way if you see a topic twice, you know you are not crazy

You might wonder about the other bundles shipped that don’t appear in the Technical Concepts section (like the Guidance Automation or the Reference Implementation bundles): those bundles that already had a specific section in the existing documentation were kept where they were.

How did We Do It?

To develop our documents, we used an internal tool that converts Word 2007 documents into HxS (Visual Studio Integrated Help) and CHM files. The Southworks team has been part of the dev team of this tool, and I’m happy to see that it has just become a public tool (see the Southworks’s announcement in Spanish). You can get the bits from its Codeplex site: patterns & practices: Documentation Tools.

Feedback Wanted!

Did you find the new docs organization useful? Do you hate it? Do you want to know more about how we design our docs? Please let us know - you can influence on future releases. Feel free to contact team members directly or to post a message in the Codeplex Discussions.

In case you missed it, Mariano Converti has been blogging about the Composite UI Application Block and Smart Client Software Factory in spanish. It's good to hear that because there are very few people blogging in spanish about CAB and a lot of hispanic CAB users, so this is very valuable to the community.

Here is the list of posts that he has published so far (more to come for sure!):

• Introducción a Composite UI Application Block (CAB) I (Intro to CAB)
• Introducción a Composite UI Application Block (CAB) II (Intro to CAB applications initialization) 
• Introducción a Composite UI Application Block (CAB) III - (Intro to Modules)
• Introducción a Composite UI Application Block (CAB) IV - (Intro to MVP pattern)
• Introducción a Composite UI Application Block (CAB) V - UI Extension Sites (Intro to UI Extension sites)

We released a draft version of the hands on labs for Smart Client Software Factory almost a month ago, and we got over 1000 downloads. We will release the final version soon which will include, apart from the current labs, the following ones:

• Adding offline capabilities to your solution through the Disconnected Service Agent Application Block
• Using WPF views

This is a great opportunity for you to influence on the final version of the labs. Please let us know what you think about the draft release, by either leaving your comments in our blogs, contacting us directly or posting in our community site. The following questions might help you:

• Suppose you are starting a project that uses SC-SF. Would you recommend your team members to read the labs?
• Were the procedures clear enough?
• Did you find the background information and content useful?
• What topics need further explanation?

Thanks in advance; your feedback will help us improve the labs.

After a long waiting, the hands on labs for WC-SF June 2007 are out

Download

The labs are based on the ones we used for the workshop held in Redmond on March 2007, but they contain a lot more content, background information, and revised procedures. Please let us know what you think about them.

Content

1. Lab 1: Creating and Initial Web Client Solution with a Business Module
2. Lab 2: Creating a Service
3. Lab 3: Adding Views and Unit Testing
4. Lab 4: Databinding with the View-Presenter pattern
5. Lab 5: Creating a Foundational Module
6. Lab 6: Authorization
7. Lab 7: Logging and Exception Handling
8. Lab 8: Using Page Flow

I'm happy to announce that we have published a draft version of the Hands On Labs for Smart Client Software Factory May 2007!

Download

The goal of these Hands on Labs is to provide developers with a step-by-step guidance to help them understand the core components of the factory and learn how to take advantage of them to develop smart client applications.

This set of labs is not just a minor update to the version published for the June 2006 version of the factory: we revised all the content, included additional background information, and demonstrated new features of the factory.

This release includes the following labs:

For the final release we plan to include these labs too (subject to change):

Please feel free to provide feedback in our community site. We are still in development process so you have the chance to influence on the final release.

After we shipped the May 2007 release of the Smart Client Software Factory, I moved to the Web Client Software Factory team to work in the next version (in case you missed it, the second weekly drop is already available). Since then, I've been working on the Hands On Labs for both factories. I cannot give too much details about them yet, but I can give you some hints:

• The WCSF Hands On Labs will be based on the ones that we presented in the workshop held in Redmond on March (which you can download from here). We've been working really hard to improve them taking into account the valuable feedback that we received from the attendees. The main complains I've heard are that the procedures were not detailed enough and that there was a lack of content in some parts (I remember an attendee saying “Please tell me what I just did!” :), thus we are spending a considerable amount of time on adding details and content to help users understand what they are doing, and why.
• The SCSF Hands On Labs will be built upon the existing ones. They will be updated to work with the latest release of the factory, and we are planning to cover the new features such as the ability to host WPF smartparts and the offline capabilities provided by the Disconnected Service Agent / Connection Monitor / Endpoint Catalog application blocks.

Stay tuned, I'll be publishing more details as we go on with the labs.

The second weekly drop of the Web Client Software Factory is out! You can get it from the releases page.

One of the changes that I'm most excited about is the ability to have (a kind of) dependency injection on master pages, user controls and web services apart from regular Web forms. From the releases page:

Now, instead of happening automatically, an object that wishes to be injected must call a single static method:

Microsoft.Practices.CompositeWeb.WebClientApplication.BuildItemWithCurrentContext(this);

This
will cause the DI container to walk the given instance, and resolve any
dependencies. The disadvantage is that this isn't really dependency
injection anymore; the object must know that there is a DI container
and invoke it. However, it has the major advantage that getting
dependencies resolved now works for, and in exactly the same manner,
pages, master pages, controls, and web services. Among other things,
this enables building user controls and master pages using the MVP
pattern.

Please let us know what you think of this change on our forum.

Go grab the zip and start playing with it

If you want to know the internals of the guidance package that will be shipped in SC-SF v2, don’t miss this post from Juan Arguello:

Smart Client Guidance development

I’m proud to announce that I’ll be part of the team that is in charge of delivering the v2 of the Smart Client Software Factory, which will include new functionality, a lot of updates and a number of usability fixes. I’ve worked with most of the guys in the team in the first version of the factory and also in the development of the Web Client Software Factory, so I’m sure we’ll have a wonderful experience as we had in the past.

One of the members of the team is Blaine Wastell, project manager. He has just started his blog and has posted a lot of cool stuff. Keep an eye on it because he’ll be posting frequently to let you know about the state of our iterations and the project’s progress.

We have just had our first drop, which you can get it from Codeplex site.

See the plan for Smart Client Software Factory v2 in Blaine’s blog: Plan for Smart Client Software Factory April Update

During the next month we will be offering a workshop for those of you willing to learn about the Web Client Software Factory and to meet the crazy guys who developed it

The Client Team at patterns & practices will be hosting a 2 days, instructor-led training event covering the recently released Web Client Software Factory.

When? Monday, March 12^th – Tuesday, March 13^th

Where? Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, Washington, USA.

Who should attend? Anyone interested in jumpstarting their adoption of the Factory as the underlying architecture for web applications; and in using automation to streamline the development of applications of this type.

…

More details in Eugenio's blog:

Announcement: Web Client Software Factory Workshop

Hope to see you there!