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.

Silverlight hidden detail: can´t write to UI while doing asynchronous calls

Let's get some data from a RSS feed. No big deal, because there's a pretty example in the silverlight site quickstarts.

However, I wanted to do my concept prove in VB.Net, and take the data from a List in Sharepoint.

As usual, Sharepoint let's you create your list, then you can add some items, and because I don´t know the trick to get directly the RSS reference, I publish the list contents in a Content query web part, activating the feed.

Ah, of course, you must add a Clientpolicyaccess.xml file on tje root of the site to get access.

But when I translate the code for my new Silverlight app, and ran it: surprise!!!! Nothing happends. So I check the IDE output and there's a message like this:

A first chance exception of type 'System.UnauthorizedAccessException' occurred in System.Windows.dll

So I added a variable to get the content from the feed, and a button to launch the textbox refresh. The content reading was fine; and when the button was clicked the content was assigned fine, so where's the deal?

Thanks to the post from Mark Monster, I discover the trick: use

Dispatcher.BeginInvoque(Adressof YourUIUpdateOps)

inside the thread; you need to create a method called YourUIUpdateOps to define the UI ops that you need.

And all this is needed because you can't perform UI ops in threads used for async communications (beware of WS).

24 hours to get the answer. Such is life.

Silverlight. Day 3.

I´m still watching videos to understand more about how to develop a Silverlight app, and in the part 3 of the Blend tutorial by Jesse Liberty there's a step where you apply a style to the button of the chat prototype where the cut & paste really makes me question the UI development.

First, as always that you want some "special shape" button, you need to define the view of its states (generally 3). But why do you need to specify this templates in Visual Studio manually? Why not to apply some Power Point wisdom and have a pallete of predefined shapes to choose from. And if you know about button states, why not have some configuration panel in Blend for this? if you have a UI dedicated tool, let's charge it!

The one great things that I found is this ObservableCollection that works with generics, that can be consumed by a control in a MVC way. That is cool!

Silverlight. Day 1.

"What the hell is this? Where are the controls? What is this mess inside the project?"

These are my first impressions after I open a friend's example (first thing I saw was a XAML file, then some code, and then some messages about trials), without reading no tutorials or going to therapy, to prepare myself with this 2008 shock. I had the same sensation that I experienced 10 years ago when I wanted to do some UI stuff with Java; no IDE, just some third party tools or code it by hand. Blindness.

My pal told me: "You make the UI with expression Blend".

But why do you need a special tool to manage XML UI definitions? There's no more IDE. This is a MDE (Messy Development Environment).

The apology is based in roles. The designer need something to design and the developer someting to code. But when you make some desktop app you have controls, or a web app you have more controls, why with Silverlight you ain´t have nothing?

(I suddenly remember this song: Two steps behind - Def Leppard)

Now I understand why in the last 3 MS events where they showed this things I felt very upset and confused.

After this non pleasant experience, I believe Flex is a much better platform to make RIAs. No doubt about it.