The Model View Controller (MVC) architecture is valued for its enforced separation
of concerns in development. In Web development, MVC breaks apps into interfaces
(views), business logic (models) and a controller that moderates the traffic
flow. This approach is hugely useful for enterprise-scale development, where
code maintenance and unit-level QA become paramount.
The MVC architecture has long been used in Web app frameworks like Ruby on
Rails and Apache Struts. Now, Microsoft is pushing ASP.NET Web application development
in the direction of MVC, with the release of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions.
As RDN Senior Editor Kathleen Richards reported
Monday, the addition of MVC within ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions could plug a big
hole in Microsoft's Web development story.
"ASP.NET is so easy to use for the rapid app developer, but for the enterprise
folks, the people who need to build maintainable code, ASP.NET is a nightmare
because of the design style that Microsoft did," said Don Demsak, a New
Jersey-based .NET solutions consultant and blogger (www.donxml.com).
"It was originally designed for the original VB6 crowd -- using WinForms
-- to switch over to the Internet. They did a lot of techniques to make it seamless
for them but in taking those shortcuts, in dealing with that encapsulation there,
it made it harder to maintain, especially for folks who like to use design patterns
to build their code."
Microsoft's Developer Division GM Scott Guthrie said developers can continue
to work in the Web Forms component control-driven model of ASP.NET, but with
ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions, the option to adopt MVC design patterns is now there.
Developers can even choose to use both in the same application, Guthrie said.
So what will you do? Is the MVC model in ASP.NET something you expect to move
to in the coming months? E-mail me at mdesmond@reddevnews.com.
Posted by Michael Desmond on 12/12/20072 comments
As
RDN Industry Editor Barbara Darrow
reported
last week, the
Microsoft
Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is back on the schedule, after
being postponed from its October 2007 date. The conference is now scheduled
for Oct. 27-30, 2008 in Los Angeles.
The announcement comes a week or so after Microsoft announced a delay for another
developer-centric show: the popular WinHEC hardware engineering confab. WinHEC
has been pushed back six months to the fall of 2008. Microsoft has yet to determine
the exact date and location.
Developers can expect the new shows to herald another busy period of assessment
and review, as Microsoft trundles out beta and alpha versions of new technologies
and frameworks. Among the key technologies I'd expect to draw an audience at
PDC is .NET Framework 4.0.
Some, like reader Juan Foegen, are looking forward to another crack at PDC.
"PDC has been quite valuable to me in the past. Most conferences offer
little in terms of changes to MFC/C++. [From] what little I read, there are
a lot of exciting changes done for the C++ world and about the only conference
that covers any of that is PDC," Foegen wrote. "PDC is usually a conference
looking several years ahead, but most of us could use help just catching up."
Others, like independent developer Michael Drips of Folsom, Calif., are less
concerned "If you're a developer and already involved with MSDN, etc.,
those shows are just bling now. It's not like it was 10 years ago when they
popped out a beta that only a few people had heard of," Drips told RDN.
"PDC's becoming much more like Tech-Ed -- you go to learn stuff. I don't
know of anyone in the development community who looks forward to PDC anymore,"
Drips concluded.
Are you looking forward to PDC, or is it a conference whose time has passed?
E-mail me at mdesmond@reddevnews.com.
Posted by Michael Desmond on 12/12/20072 comments
We're looking to get a jump on 2008 by asking folks what they expect to see
happen in the year to come. Do you have a forward-looking opinion, perspective,
insight or rant you'd like to share? Shoot me an e-mail at
mdesmond@reddevnews.com,
and your New Year's prognostication could end up published in the January issue
of
Redmond Developer News (and if we publish your take, you'll even win
a T-shirt).
Posted by Michael Desmond on 12/12/20072 comments
It's a well-worn cycle. Microsoft talks about an exciting new development technology
that promises to be the Best Thing Ever (BTE). Microsoft ships the technology,
but takes months to get the tooling out, so coders forget about it and move
on to another BTE. Then the tooling finally emerges, and coders quickly learn
that the BTE is really hard to use.
That cycle is about to replay itself with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF),
the exciting new graphics subsystem that relies on Extensible Application Markup
Language (XAML) to express application interfaces and graphics. While WPF and
XAML let you do all sorts of exciting things -- like mixed 3-D and 2-D graphics
and animation without crushing complexity -- there's a catch.
Developers are going to have to learn, from scratch, how to work with this
stuff. Steve Dadoly, vice president of engineering for component maker Infragistics,
led a team of programmers who faced the WPF learning curve. "A lot of my
engineers had to relearn how to make controls because the approach is different,"
he said.
Jason Beres, Infragistics' director of product management, agreed. "We're
good at it now even though we did really struggle in the beginning, because
it was really different creating for Windows forms than WPF."
"It is a shift," Beres added. "The platform offers new capabilities
and new features. If they want to offer basic forms over data, they can do that.
But really it's about the user experience. I would compare this in terms of
what the platform offers as easily a big jump, from Windows 3.1 or Windows 95
to Vista. It's a major leap forward."
As a result, Beres said, companies may need to be patient as they work to roll
out compelling WPF applications. "It will take a couple years for those
great [WPF] applications to come out. So training is critical."
So are you ready to take the leap? E-mail me at mdesmond@reddevnews.com.
Posted by Michael Desmond on 12/05/20070 comments
We all know how crazy 2007 has been, with an absolute flood of Microsoft technologies
reaching developers this year. What's really interesting is that 2008 could
be more disruptive still.
Our question for you is, what do you think is coming in 2008? Will dev shops
actually begin coding for WPF and XAML, now that Visual Studio 2008 and the
relevant WPF tooling is finally here? Can we expect more companies to commit
to Windows Mobile development in an era of opened access to providers' wireless
networks? And will Visual Studio 2008, and the forthcoming Rosario Team System
update, earn the attention of corporate dev shops right out of the gate?
We want to hear from you. We'd like to hear your predictions and prognostications
for the year to come. And it doesn't have to be about Microsoft. What will Google's
next great challenge to Microsoft look like and what does the company need to
do to earn your loyalty? Do you have any thoughts on what skills will be most
in-demand in 2008 and how it will affect the way companies acquire talent?
Send me your insights by e-mail and you could be featured in our upcoming feature
story offering predictions for the new year. E-mail me at mdesmond@reddevnews.com.
Posted by Michael Desmond on 12/05/20071 comments
Lately, when it comes to discussing .NET and other key platform innovations
at Microsoft, I've taken to using a building analogy. For over a year, Microsoft
has been rolling out one fantastic, new platform technology after the next,
but has failed to produce mature tooling to support it. It's as if Redmond had
built a shining skyscraper that towers over the existing skyline, and never
installed the elevators.
You want to enjoy the sweeping views? You had to walk the steps. Or, in the
case of .NET 3.0, you had to hand-write the XAML code.
Well, with the release
last week of Visual Studio 2008, the express elevators are finally installed
and working. And as Steve Dadoly, vice president of engineering at component-maker
Infragistics, told me, it's been quite a ride. Dadoly's team, you see, has been
working with WPF and XAML for years, in an effort to get WPF-enabled components
to market ahead of the VS08 launch. It's been a struggle.
"It was painful," Dadoly laughed. "There were a lot of different
CTPs and betas and alphas we got from Microsoft in the beginning. A lot of my
engineers had to relearn how to make controls because the approach is different.
We did a lot of hand-coding with XAML."
But Dadoly couldn't say enough about the impact VS08 is having on his organization:
"Most of the pain I spoke of is now gone because of Visual Studio 2008.
The Designer is now good. [Expression] Blend brings a whole new angle to it.
There is less hand-coding."
Dadoly praised the tooling for LINQ, AJAX and the team-oriented features in
the Team Foundation Server product. But he was effusive about the way VS08 has
transformed the way design teams work with developers at Infragistics.
"I think in the past someone would create a wire frame or screenshot of
what the application should look like, and then the developer would try to approximate
it," Dadoly recounted. "It was more of a waterfall process. Now things
are more agile. We don't have a development team and a design team. We just
have a WPF team, and they work together."
There's a word of warning in all this, though. Dadoly said dev shops face both
a technical and a management challenge, as they look to take advantage of WPF,
XAML and related technologies under VS08. From the interaction of various project
teams to the new approaches mandated by XAML code, it's clear an adjustment
process is ahead.
Do you plan to deploy VS08 and dive into the advanced features provided by
WPF, XAML and LINQ? Let us know how you think VS08 might change your approach
to development. E-mail me at mdesmond@reddevnews.com.
Posted by Michael Desmond on 11/28/20070 comments
This week, news broke that Verizon Wireless, the nation's second-largest wireless
network provider, would
open
its network to third-party devices and applications. The move was a major
shift for the telecommunications giant, which -- like other major telcom players
-- has jealously restricted access to its network.
Why the change? In a word: Google.
The same company that has bedeviled Microsoft to no end this century has also
been taking the fight to the telcom sector. As RDN Executive Editor Jeffrey
Schwartz reported, Google on Nov. 5 launched a mobile platform called Android
and formed the Open Handset Alliance with the backing of wireless players like
T-Mobile, HTC, Qualcomm and Motorola. Google also hinted it might bid on the
new wireless spectrum offered in auction by the FCC.
The moves upped the competitive stakes for wireless incumbents in an arena
already charged by the emergence of public wireless LANs and technologies like
WiMAX.
Said Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst of San Jose, Calif.-based
Enderle Group: "I think it's a realization that the market is about to
change. To be a survivor of the change that's to come, you want to be ahead
of the change and aggressive and not wait until the change starts taking market
share away from you."
For developers, the Verizon announcement could help open the mobile application
floodgates. Enterprises have long been frustrated by the brittle nature of mobile
platforms and networks, which typically require homogenous hardware to ensure
reliability. Verizon Wireless said it will publish technical information for
developers, and offer a testing lab for device and application approval. The
resources should help developers craft applications that run reliably across
multiple handsets and devices.
Could we be on the verge, finally, of a wireless renaissance? Or should development
shops wait things out before they commit dollars and people to crafting a new
generation of mobile apps? Let me know your thoughts. E-mail me at mdesmond@reddevnews.com.
Posted by Michael Desmond on 11/28/20070 comments
Back
in May, we reported on the surprising postponement/cancellation of the Microsoft
Professional Developers Conference (PDC), which had been slated to take place
in Los Angeles in October. Microsoft at the time stated that the change was
due to the fact that many key bits were already in developers' hands in preview
form. We suspect that the real issue went deeper than a simple scheduling gaffe,
and might have something to do with the slow and uneven progress out of the
Live group over the past 18 months.
Now, RDN columnist and Redmond magazine Executive Editor Peter
Varhol is reporting that Microsoft has pushed its popular WinHEC conference
back a
full six months. As Varhol notes, WinHEC has been an incredibly valuable
and informative confab over the years, often presaging major advances to the
Windows platform. On its
WinHEC page, Microsoft is citing "industry feedback" for the delay,
though Peter and I share a certain skepticism on this point.
Could it be that the pace of hardware change is slowing down? Given the rapid-fire
advancement of multi-core processors, critical-mass adoption of virtualization
technologies and proposed high-bandwidth successors to standards like USB, that's
kind of hard to believe. What's your take on the future of PC hardware and how
it affects your development plans? Send me your thoughts at mdesmond@reddevnews.com.
Posted by Michael Desmond on 11/21/20071 comments
It's been three years and a whole lot of betas and CTPs, but the next version
of Microsoft's flagship Visual Studio IDE is finally here. As reported by
RDN
Senior Editor Kathleen Richards, Visual Studio 2008
became
available for download to MSDN subscribers on Nov. 19.
Every version of Visual Studio, from the freely available Express edition to
the enterprise-oriented Team System version, is addressed with the Visual Studio
2008 launch. VS08 includes numerous features to streamline development, including
visual designers and wizards, and hooks to tap features of the .NET Framework
previously inaccessible to developers.
Visual Studio 2008 also includes the next update to the .NET Framework (version
3.5), which delivers a host of compelling bits to .NET developers. Among the
new features in .NET Framework 3.5 is Language Integrated Query (LINQ) for programmatic
access to data stores, the ASP.NET AJAX toolkit and support for key Web 2.0
protocols.
Most important, Visual Studio 2008 finishes the work that .NET Framework 3.0
started a year ago. VS08 will allow developers to effectively tap the Windows
Presentation, Workflow and Communication Foundations that are core to .NET 3.0,
while also opening new avenues to AJAX, database and even Silverlight-based
development.
Visual Studio 2008 is looking very much like a must-get upgrade for .NET development
shops of every stripe. Do you agree? Let us know what features and capabilities
you need most, and what issues or bugs concern you. E-mail me at mdesmond@reddevnews.com.
Posted by Michael Desmond on 11/21/20072 comments
If you're like me, you've been watching the sluggish rollout of Windows Vista
and wondering about when it might be time to start targeting app development
toward the flagship client OS. By all accounts, Vista sales have lagged behind
expectations. As Redmond Media Group Online News Editor Keith Ward
reported
in an article for
Redmond magazine, research firm Gartner Inc. has
found that "Vista has had very limited impact on PC demand or replacement
activity."
And Microsoft itself in July revised sales figures for Vista's share of Microsoft
desktop OS revenues, down from 85 percent to 78 percent. Windows XP picked up
the difference, up from 15 percent to 22 percent. People, it seems, are staying
with XP in droves.
Of course, development shops must take the forward view. Despite the slow sales,
do you see Vista becoming a viable target for the desktop applications your
shops develop? Or could it be 2009 or later before corporate developers really
commit to Vista? E-mail me at mdesmond@reddevnews.com.
Posted by Michael Desmond on 11/14/20070 comments
A couple of weeks ago, I spoke with Sam Hiser, vice president of the OpenDocument
Foundation, a small group dedicated to advancing the industry standard OpenDocument
Format specification. At the time, Hiser's group had very publicly and emphatically
split
from the ODF working group, complaining that the XML-based spec was hamstrung
by Sun Microsystems and other organizations unwilling to shape ODF into a true,
universal file format.
Hiser, foundation president Gary Edwards and technical expert Paul Marbux are
about all there ever was to the OpenDocument Foundation. This was a small but
vocal clutch of technologists, who seemed determined to give as good as they
got in the standards-making arena. But they might have got more than they bargained
for, when they left the ODF working group.
Today, the OpenDocument Foundation is done. Closed. Shuttered. There's nothing
left of it on the Web but blog echoes and 404 errors.
Talk to Simon Phipps, Sun's chief open source officer, and you'll hear him
call Hiser and Edwards' group "a shell that consists of just three people"
and that they "got out of their depth in OASIS," the standards-making
body for ODF. Phipps contends the group picked up and left when things didn't
go the way they wanted.
What they wanted, Hiser said, is for ODF to go further than to just be the
XML-based object model for the OpenOffice suite. Hiser said his group was urging
ODF to take on the tough interoperability issues posed by function-rich applications
like Microsoft Office, and to arm the ODF spec with tools for at least managing
and preserving the bits produced by them.
That may come in ODF version 1.2 or 1.3, said Phipps. But it's not going to
happen now.
The upshot of all this is that nothing has really changed in the ODF process.
There doesn't seem to be a grand split or splintering of the spec. And the ODF
community will no doubt fight tooth and nail against a scheduled February vote
to approve Microsoft Office Open XML as an ISO standard.
What are your thoughts on the OpenDocument Foundation decision to publicly
split from the ODF community? Did they do a good thing by perhaps calling attention
to an important flank in the XML file format fight, or did they only succeed
in adding misplaced FUD to the ODF spec? E-mail me at mdesmond@reddevnews.com.
Posted by Michael Desmond on 11/14/20070 comments
Scott Guthrie, general manager of the Developer Division at Microsoft, has
been telling us for months that Visual Studio 2008 would arrive in November
of this year. And you know what? I didn't really believe him.
After all, VS08 is a huge upgrade for Redmond's flagship IDE. For the first
time, rank and file developers are actually going to get a chance to work with
all the neat and shiny stuff we've been reporting on for the past year. Stuff
like Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), the underlying Extensible Application
Markup Language (XAML) for expressing application UIs and Language Integrated
Query (LINQ) for querying data stores from directly within C# or Visual Basic.
So color me impressed that Microsoft is lined
up to make deadline, despite some bumps along the way.
As Gartner analyst Mark Driver noted to me the other day, the emergence of
AJAX as an absolute must-have capability really scrambled Microsoft's plans.
"AJAX completely caught them by surprise. Their plans for a next-generation
UI did not involve AJAX at all. They had WPF as a next-generation declarative
UI," said Driver, who added: "I think Silverlight may end up being
the saving grace for WPF as it matures."
Yes, Silverlight development is supported in VS08 as well, though it remains
incomplete as the dev-centric Silverlight 1.1 product remains in an open-ended
alpha state for the time being. But what Silverlight will do is hook an energetic
nation of Web developers to XAML -- the same XAML that is at the heart of WPF-powered
UIs. Can you feel the leverage?
For people who've been patiently waiting for a reason to get excited about
all the framework and foundation work being done at Redmond, it's time. With
VS08 finally coming to market, dev shops can get to work crafting the next generation
of Windows, .NET and Web applications.
Are you going to jump on Visual Studio 2008? E-mail me at mdesmond@reddevnews.com,
and let me know your thoughts about VS08 and whether you plan to move to your
apps to WPF.
Posted by Michael Desmond on 11/07/20073 comments