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Blaine & I have been getting a lot of emails, messages, comments, etc about WCSF.  There are a lot of people interested in a public statement from patterns & practices about the roadmap for WCSF and future support of WCSF, in addition to the "normal" feature requests. Well, we have some good news: Blaine has publicly released the WCSF roadmap in his blog as Roadmap for WCSF . Basically, right now, we are asking for feedback from the community.  Let Blaine and/or I know what you want via our blogs, email, or the WCSF CodePlex site at www.codeplex.com/websf .  You can also create work items/ issues on the WCSF CodePlex site and have people vote on them ( http://www.codeplex.com/websf/WorkItem/List.aspx ). ...

You all might be amazed by the number of emails, messages, and calls I get asking for any of the following: Guidance on SharePoint Requests to add SharePoint Guidance to WCSF Requests to add "Office applications" support to SCSF Well, I can finally help out folks looking for guidance on how to build SharePoint applications by saying "go check out the CodePlex project for patterns & practices SharePoint Guidance ( http://www.codeplex.com/spg )." If you are hoping for SharePoint support in WCSF, you should probably check this out too. Blaine and Francis are leading the effort on this project. I understand that they are tackling a few big challenges that customers have ranked as the most important including (this list is...

Chris Tavares and I were chatting yesterday morning about an idea Chris had: building a simple, reusable Http Module that gives folks DI scoped to the Application, Session, and Request. Yesterday afternoon, during the p&p Dev team's weekly "Code Kata" we threw together a spike/proof of concept in a couple of hours. "Code Kata" is a three hour block of time that the p&p Dev team uses for a number of things: cross-project pollination of ideas, things that work, things that don't work across project teams investigating new and emerging technologies that p&p may work with in the future investigating new and emerging platforms to determine if p&p may want to provide guidance in the future play with new...

This is the fifth post in a series. The other post include: Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Intro . Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Adding an ICompositionContainer Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Clean Up ICompositionContainer Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Ummmm...Oooops. If you want background, go read the earlier posts. Based upon feedback, I am making the source code available at CWAB and Unity . First off, I have moved this little side project to source control, so I can avoid the re-work I had to do before I could write this part of the series. Note to self : NEVER work without a safety net. That means both unit tests and source control...

This is the third post in a series. The other post include Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Intro . Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Adding an ICompositionContainer If you want background, go read the earlier posts. Based upon feedback, I am making the source code available at CWAB and Unity . In the last post, we started getting closer to my eventual goal. However, we still need to get rid of the static methods, Builder, Locator, Containers, and Services. Why? Static methods will make the necessary refactorings a pain in the.... well, a pain. Builder and Locator are handled by Unity internally, and we no longer need to deal with them directly. Containers will just be registered in the root container...

This is the second post in a series. The initial post is Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Intro . If you want background, go read the first post. Let's get started with some coding. First, I backed up my WCSF and WCSF-AppBlock code. Then, I opened up Visual Studio 2008, opened the Composite Web Application Block solution (with VSTS Tests), compiled, and ran all the tests. All Green. Now for the tough part, thinking about what we want to do. Basically, we need to be able to replace the CompositionContainer with an IUnityContainer, and remove a lot of dead code. How can we do this? We need to have a simple interface that would work as a facade on both containers (and any others). So, let's create an interface for...

I spent two weeks between full time projects (still working on the 2 part time projects I am on) looking back at the build logs from the past 6 months (or so) trying to figure out what metrics we have, what we should track going forward, and what goals we should have for these metrics. I came up with some interesting findings. First, overall unit test code coverage was OK, but not as high as I would like on my projects. Of course, these numbers included generated code, view code, and other things that I usually filter out. Also coverage was fairly flat. For the most part, as we added code, we added tests. This, I think is much better than one of the alternatives, having coverage drop over the course of the project. Here is coverage for the Application...

When we originally released the Web Client Software Factory February 2008, there was an issue for a number of folks. If you had VS2005 installed with the October release of WCSF, you could not install the February release on VS2008 without uninstalling the October version. After some feedback fromcustomers who need to support both WCSF 1.1 apps and WCSF 2.0 apps, we have re-released the factory installer. The install no longer forces an un-install of the Oct release, allowing side-by-side support. Go get the refreshed MSI from the download center . Blaine recently blogged about this too . Read More...

I know that folks have been reading about the Web Client Software Factory on Blaine's blog and on Glenn's blog. Blaine posted about what we planned to include, back in December with Next version of Web Client Software Factory (WCSF) . Glenn had the post at the end of January, Web Client 2.0 closer than you think , and Web Client 2.0, what's the hold up? So, what is in the latest version of the Web Client Software Factory? Here is a quick blurb from the front page of our docs, with my comments in Blue : The February 2008 release of the Web Client Software Factory is an update to the June 2007 release. The following are the major changes: Added user interface responsiveness guidance . The guidance includes documentation, Web controls...

Brian J. Cardiff ( from Clarius Consulting) is one of the developers on the Web Client team.  He has asked me to post an article for him, since he does not have a blog (yet). Here it is (with some re-formatting): Developing a ASP .NET Control with client capabilities (using ASP .NET Ajax Extensions support) Since the AjaxControlToolkit appears, creating extenders control like Autocomplete ( AjaxControlToolkit ) or Contextual Autocomplete ( Web Software Factory ) is a task that involves more work in JavaScript and Metadata that classic .NET programming. In this post I will point out some of the key aspects to create, a Control that takes advance of the ASP .NET Ajax Extensions . The post is based on the RealTimeSearchMonitor control located...