Windows smart client software factory

NET Framework releases. See the link to the left for the announcement, and many comments back from the community. Major benefits of using software factories: Reduce risk — baseline app is created for you Accelerated start — agile Quality — reusable assets Productivity — automation and patterns Adoption — extensible toolkit The May07 release of SCSF is now available and is the final SCSF release , which includes support for generating VB. With Acropolis you will be able to: Quickly create WPF enabled user experiences for your client applications.

Build client applications from reusable, connectable, modules that allow you to easily create complex, business-focused applications in less time. Integrate and host your modules in applications such as Microsoft Office, or quickly build stand-alone client interfaces. Change the look and feel of your application quickly using built-in themes, or custom designs using XAML. Add features such as workflow navigation and user-specific views with minimal coding. Manage, update, and deploy your application modules quickly and easily.

Check it out! Thursday, January 13, As solution architects, we aim to simplify the ever-expanding landscape of business applications and to improve the user experience, but one of the hardest objectives to meet is to integrate a solution seamleassly across multiple applications running on the desktop. But the result has been highly coupled, brittle desktop applications that are typically expensive to maintain and deploy.

The Integrated Desktop is the latest installment of a connected systems architecture that focuses on the desktop.

Integrated Desktop is a loosely coupled hosting architecture and composite UI that runs on the desktop and is supported by a loosely coupled architecture on the back end. It collapses the number of applications a user must deal with and places everything under a single piece of "glass". All the technologies needed for building Integrated Desktop applications are already present in the.

NET Framework. Until now, however, stitching them together has been a major challenge. The underlying current of the Integrated Desktop strategy is service enablement. While the architecture does not absolutely require a services fabric, a strategy of building composable enterprise desktops does.

The loosely coupled nature of Integrated Desktop applications is a natural fit for a service-enabled back end. Preserving the attributes of a loosely coupled architecture carries through to deployment, where these kinds of architectures often run into obstacles.

Used together, these are powerful tools for solution architects who are crafting their own desktop framework and custom application. Before moving on, familiarize yourself with the terms shown in the "Basic Terminology" sidebar.

CAB is an implementation of the patterns and concepts used for building complex smart client applications. We could easily fill an entire article just discussing CAB, and there are several components that are outside the scope of this article. We'll focus here on the primary components of CAB, but we encourage you to download and explore it in detail for yourself.

Start by visiting the CAB community site. CAB is designed to support many application scenarios, such as online transaction processing OLTP front ends, client portals, and information worker applications.

Because of its modular design and small footprint, CAB can be used not only for large-scale integrated desktops but even for simple smart clients. CAB enables the sharing of development tasks of a single smart client interface by neatly decoupling the interface parts. Ultimately, CAB improves reuse and can easily enable such concepts as intra-application workflow.

To enable reuse, a composite UI built using the CAB framework is broken up into several working parts. The driver is the shell of the application, which acts as the host executable as well as the bootstrap for loading your composite UI parts.

Loaded and displayed by the shell, UI elements provide user "contact points" such as menus and other navigation components. Shells are loosely coupled to the application parts themselves, thus providing a flexible approach to UI design. The shell and the CAB services drive the car, but you have to supply the engine of the application or applications the shell will host.

Besides providing a framework for hosting reusable parts, CAB also offers a core set of smart client services for such tasks as loading modules, communicating messages, persisting state, and so on. These can be added in code or via your application's. These core services include:. Module Loader and Module Enumeration Services are provider-based services for controlling reading and loading of modules listed in the configurable catalog. Event Broker Service passes messages from part to part and sub-application to sub-application hosted by a composite UI.

Authentication Service is a provider-based service responsible for asking users for credentials, accessing certificates, and contacting back-end data providers. State Persistence Service is a provider-based storage service that saves work item state for sharing context data and for allowing work items to be suspended and reactivated later.

Modules provide a deployable entry point for your individual feature set which is sometimes referred to as a hosted application. Modules are contained within their own DLL files and are loaded at run time from the shell. Which modules are available and loaded is completely configurable and driven by an extensible program catalog.

Instead, they are loaded at run time by the module loader. Inside a module's assembly you provide the work items, views, controllers, and data that are necessary to drive that feature set with the aid of CAB and the Smart Client Software Factory types such as Presenter, SmartPart, and State.

Services are injected when needed by the application logic. This allows the developer to create new object instances dynamically or return objects already created within a container.

For CAB, that container is the work item and it is one of the first things created by the module developer. CAB components, such as client-side services and workspaces, can be added to the container explicitly using AddNew:. Within the scope of the container work item , those components can also be declaratively dereferenced as needed. This provides a loosely coupled means to get access to inject any contained item managed by CAB, as shown here:.

Providing an implementation of this dependency injection, Object Builder enables a number of useful features. It can create new concrete class instances or return existing ones when appropriate; it can select the appropriate constructor when a class exposes more than one; it can respond to attributes declared on the properties and methods, which influence the creation and naming of the new object; and it can provide a tear-down facility that can remove settings from existing objects by reversing the chain of operations.

Object Builder is a low-level utility and in most cases you won't directly interact with it. However, understanding the concept of Dependency Injection is crucial to understanding how services are plugged into your module, and this knowledge will be of great help when you're debugging.

Basic Terminology. Before diving deeper into Integrated Desktop technology, you must first understand the basic terminology. CAB provides the framework and guidance necessary to help you build complex, loosely coupled, smart clients that provide run-time composability.

Context refers to shared data that is common to multiple applications. Context information is used to relate information from part to part, even when those parts are contained in hosted sub-applications within the composite UI.

This is an implementation of a design pattern by Martin Fowler, sometimes referred to as Inversion of Control. Module refers to the deployment unit for CAB applications. Modules are contained in assembly files DLLs and can include one or more sub-applications that will be hosted by the composite UI. Go To Solution.

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