What is the best strategy to convert silverlight application to html? - html

We have an application that is heavily used. In this application we have business logic in our viewmodels and in the service layer
Now we need to migrate the app to html because of performance issues, plus considering that Microsoft throw out the support for this technology.
We can't just stop the application for several months to finish it's migration. Our clients needs to use it. My first approach will be to migrate all the business logic to the services, making the app a thin client, so we can later use the services for ayax calls in a new ui, made with html
Do you have any experience with this migrations? What are the pros and cons?

We are currently doing one of these projects
what I would recommend is following
Have all business logic that aren't UI specific or silverlight specific in its own Business Libraries.
Put a service layer WCF or WebAPI (REST) on top of the Business logic so all the business logic can be accessed via different technologies
Use AngularJS or ASP.NET MVC + AngularJS combination so you can keep MV* pattern going and most probably use most of your ViewModel logic with bit change while giving some what similar experience to customers that are used to silverlight UI
1 and 2 was very important in our project because it gave that clean separation and flexibility to expand to any client machine without changing minimum code. Ex: later if we decided to make an Android app you just have to transfer only viewmodel logic without touching your business logic or services.

Related

JayData vs Upshot (crossplatform HTML5 app)

I'm just in the planning phase of developing my iPhone/iPad/Android app.
Basically the app will query data from remote data sources and store it locally. As data management will be the key feature of this app, so the UI isn't an important factory in this case. I decided to develop a HTML5 and JavaScript-based hybrid application and deploy it with PhoneGap/Cordova.
I'm a .NET developer, I use Visual Studio 11 for web development, so I found the Single Page Application template, which uses Upshot.js by default.
By exploring the alternatives, I've found JayData http://jaydata.org library. It seems to me that it's something similar to upshot.js.
Could you share your opinion, which way should I go to build a cross-platform HTML5 application?
Upshot and JayData looks similar but actually they are quite different, which makes your choice easier. There are things however both provides
Both has pros and cons (as everything in life)
Upshot.js is backed by Microsoft and focuses mainly on oData + Knockoutjs support. It is included in Visual Studio. You can query oData endpoints with it using a procedural query language.Upshot supports read/write operations, and also realtime updates.
JayData supports multiple datasources, among them are oData but also device local webSql as well, plus some other providers too. JayData let's you query oData or webSql on the same with, with sime JavaScript functions, so you dont have to learn sql and oData uri syntax. JayData provide read/write operations but realtime updates require a small user code.

How to integrate WebSockets on top of a classic ASP web application?

In one of my projects, I have a very active classic ASP site with a requirement to integrate live event-based feeds as part of the existing UI. There is a plan to upgrade the site architecture to either MVC or MVP in the future, but this new feature must be implemented in the meanwhile.
I have decided to go with a WebSocket approach for this, as this is ultimately what we will want to use in the future, and rebuilding this doesn't make sense. The question is, how to integrate this with the classic ASP "architecture"?
The site already implements the jQuery library, and was hoping to leverage jQuery's capabilities to create those streamed sections on a given page.
The current req's ask for this news feed to exist on every page. Thus, loading a new page will re-render the news feed, and should kick of from where it left on the last page. For this, I'm guessing a position indicator will need to be read (session variable I'm guessing).
Anyhow, those are the requirements. I was thinking of wrapping the the entire existing classic ASP site inside a MVC or MVP (C#/.Net) project to allow us to begin swapping out legacy features as they are developed, such as this one.
I would like to get some advice on some recommended approaches for this scenario.
Thanks.
I would do a SignalR app and integrate it in you old app.
It's easy to integrate ASP classic with ASP.net MVC. Just mix the projects and exclude *.asp from the routes
routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.asp/{*pathInfo}");
You will have some trouble in the root (/), but you can sort it with a redirect.
For a mixed authentication (if you need it) you will need to write your own authentication in MVC to use the same auth cookie that you use in Classic ASP. I've done this in the past with success.

fastest public web app framework for quick DB apps?

I'd like to pick up a new tech for my toolbox - something for rapid prototyping of web apps. Brief requirements:
public access (not hosted on my machine) - like Google's appengine, etc
no tricky configuration necessary to build a simple web app host
DB access (small storage provided) including some kind of SQLish query language
easy front end HTML templating
ability to access as a JSON service
C# or Java,PHP or Python - or a fun new language to learn is OK
free!
An example app, very simple: render an AJAXy editable (add/delete/edit/drag) list of rich-data list items via some template language, so I can quickly mock up a UI for a client. ie. I can do most of the work client-side, but need convenient back end to handle the permanent storage. (In fact I suppose it doesn't even need HTML templating if I can directly access a DB via AJAX calls.)
I realize this is a bit vague but am wondering if anyone has recommendations. A Rails host might be best for this (but probably not free) or maybe App Engine, or some other choice I'm not aware of? I've been doing everything with heavyweight servers (ASP.NET etc) for so long that I'm just not up on the latest...
Thanks - I'll follow up on comments if this isn't clear enough :)
C# or Java,PHP or Python - or a fun new language to learn is OK
How 'bout Javascript? This place hosts server-side Javascript ticking most of your other boxes. So you can use the same language for client- and server-side stuff (which I find very handy). [Caveat: I only played with their service; seemed cool though. I use Javascript on the server-side on IIS and on Tomcat (via Rhino).]
For something bleeding edge - A new version of spring roo was released recently. With it you can create a great web app in 10 minutes. Supports GAE and GWT...
http://www.springsource.org/roo
xataface is a quick way to make a front end for a MySQL database.
It makes it easy to start an app quickly with dynamically created views and then you can change it to something very customized to your needs.
It simply needs a server service with MySQL and PHP.

Experience of developing web version of a desktop application

We are in the process of starting a web version of desktop application developed in Winforms in vs2008 with linq-to-sql.Has anyone ever done such an implementation? What issues you faced when reusing code for web version?
if you partitioned your business logic and data layer into well-separated objects, it works well. But if you have UI logic scattered throughout it's gonna be painful. My advice: separate projects and unit test for UI, Business Objects, Business Logic and Data and use interfaces between each layer. Done it multiple times and it provides the best way . Of course you're already tied into an existing system.
if you design your application with n-tier architecture, thus you must have separated logic and data access and UI layers. with this architecture you don't need that write logic and data access layers. only write a new web ui for this.

MS CRM Development Projects

The shop that I am working part time with is new to Microsoft CRM. I just want to survey what projects have developers done to the system to extend its capabilities.
I can break the work I did into four sections:
Tailoring - Simple field level changes. A lot of this is just making sure the fields and language suited the business I was developing for.
Customisation - More complex changes, generally needing JavaScript and maybe ASP.NET. Some examples would be to use an IFrame and pass values to it from a CRM form. The IFrame would then do interesting things like mapping, charting or give you buttons to do other things. For buttons I would often times use JavaScript to replace the outerHTML in the HTML dom of an IFRAME to show a button rather.
Integration - using .NET to connect MSCRM to other systems. Connected it to Great Plains, Speech Server, SCOM (was called MOM back then), custom LOB systems etc... One interesting one I did was to develop a SSIS component that wrote into MSCRM via the web services.
Reporting - Building reports. In reporting services and in Excel. Excel made for great dashboards because of the dynamic update nature of it.
I have a few (war) stories up at http://www.sadev.co.za/taxonomy/term/7 if you are interested.
I (and others) have implemented a LINQ query provider for the web service layer http://www.codeplex.com/LinqtoCRM.
I did some work with CRM 3.0. My work enhanced the program and turned it into a Document Management app, where you could scan and upload documents based on a case, contact, customer, vendor etc. The .NET SDK back then could have used a bit more work, but I hear with newer versions of CRM it has gotten better. CRM allows for attachments but not at all levels, more at the case level.
We extended 3.0 to send text messages rather than email. There are tools available (for 4.0 at least) to do that now, though.
We also extended it to push service appointments through to Exchange, as due to the workforce being mostly mobile they did not have the CRM client for Outlook.
Two other major areas of development not yet mentioned are plugins and custom workflow assemblies.
Plugins allow you to intercept many of the messages that CRM processes to insert custom logic. The possibilities this gives you are endless because you can intercept all kinds of messages including Create, Update, Delete, and even Read!
Custom workflow assemblies are assemblies that you register with CRM that integrate with CRM's workflow UI. Often times, they perform simple tasks that are useful when modifying form data. Other times, they are more complex like sending status reports.
Custom workflow assemblies are always listed beneath the native options. In the screenshot, everything below "Stop Workflow" was added via a custom workflow assembly.