ASP.Net MVC 4 all: what's next?

Yesterday I released a new version of the "ASP.Net MVC 4 All". Of course its free for all ;)

I believe the basics part is now robust enough, and the new PDF is easier to navigate thanks to the Office 2007 add-in that provides the convertion between DOCX and PDF (it's great to have the links active and a native index to surf it).

So, what's next? Well, I've been thinking, and now that the tutorial has many toy samples to show the basic MVC capabilities, as well of several ASP.Net techniques, the most natural thing is to work in a complete system to show the complete development pipeline of an application.

To do this, it's very impoortant to state a method to make the analysis and design of the app, and apply it to this new system.

I have several options for this system:
- project management site
- an information system for a construction company
- a history site, that adopts some social networking-oriented functionality

From the technical perspective, I want to integrate some Silverlight 3 things (yesterday I went to a tech days session and it was very interesting), WCF and some other stuff I'm working on.

I am starting today with all these, so I believe maybe it will be ready for late september.

ASP.Net MVC 4 all

I found this interesting opensource framework for the .Net platform, and even when lots of friends are playing with Ruby and PHP frameworks, my everyday tool is VS 2k8, so I give it a try.

There are lots of articles, tutorials, videos, and I started to make collections of links. But when I began to code, I made some notes that begin to grow, and grow, to the point where I decided to make a tutorial under Creative Commons license and now its available at scribd.com

I hope this material helps the people who want to get in this "new" web development platform while I continue to learn new details, techniques and tricks.

Nothing like a new toy.

To kill the open source you must buy it?

A surprising move from Oracle: is buying Sun.

So, the hardware, Java, Solaris, VirtualBox and MySQL are now part of Oracle.

The less fortunate of these technologies will be MySQL, because it's been a pain in the ass of Oracle for a few years, but not anymore. A shame and a threat for all the sites that depend of MySQL DBMS. This means an urgent shift of DB support or preparing some budget to pay Oracle for the DB.

It seems that the other player that was after Sun was IBM, but they wait too much to decide, and ...well, business are business.

The question is: what is going to happend with sll the open source support that Java, mySQL and other technologies have from the community?

Seems like Microsoft will have some meetings in the next days. And what about Google and Android for example?

As an Oracle user, Yahoo can take some advantage.

A systems simulator

When you define a system, one of the things that happened is that to see it working, generally you must implement it. In the analisys and design phase all is in your head, and many details can be hidden.

That´s why I believe that a tool that can be used in these phases to show the modeled behavior, can be extremely usefull to enhance the quality of the new system.

I found something called an Architecture Description Language (ADL), that seems to serve well to this porpouse.

Two things I like fro it:

1. Its has a formal language basis (a process algebra Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) ).
2. There are some interesting tools like ACME (Carnegie Mellon), that let us to make an implementation of the model and analize its behavior.

Maybe, this can be a new way for software architects and analists, for making software specs.

From ideas to code: a long and windy road

It´s good that companies and individuals have needs that imply software development, but to realice these ideas in cost, time & quality is hard.

During the last few months a question rounds around my head: how to define a new app/system in such a clear and detailed way that developers can translate the specification to code without uncertainty or even how to automate the translation?

I've been studing lots of modeling and designing articles and books, and there's no clear answer to this, so it´s an opportunity area.

I´ve made an specification for a solution under RUP, using UML (just a subset) , and the additional fact is that there is a lot of information that is redundant. Documentation can be broken into information unit but there´s a need for an information system that contain all this work and knowledge.

As usual, to syncronize design artifacts, documentation and code its not trivial.

Round-trip tools sound good, but they are expensive.

But I think the start point is the method. I´ve been reading about Iconix, and at first hand, it sound great, but the mapping described in the book was based in a framework I don´t use.

However, the important concept there is LIMIT.

Iconix limit the UML artifact, and get some good results; even there, its needed a set of rules of how to apply artifacts (not just the UML syntax).

However the object definition remains loose in many projects, so one way to limit this design freedom is to stablish a context, maybe with patterns, and MVC is a good one.

I'm going to experiment with all these, and later I will tell you what happends.

Cheers