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Closed 10 years ago.
Looking for a rundown of all the tools available that will allow me to develop mobile websites using the .NET stack. I'm likely going to be using MVC 4 and jQuery Mobile, but what else do I need to be thinking about as far as getting all devices compatible. Keep in mind, I'm talking about web sites, not native apps right now.
Thanks in advance.
Visual Studio is all you need to write the apps themselves. The Web Essentials VS extension is really handy with working on web related stuff, so I'd suggest taking a look at and installing it. Jquery/Jquery mobile is probably your best bet for client compatibility as far as JavaScript goes.
Now, that's all you need to MAKE the site, but for testing, you should really use actual mobile browsers. One way of course is to get your hands on an actual iOS or Android device to try out mobile safari, mobile chrome, etc. The other way is to download the SDKs and development tools for iOS and Android, which come with the iOS SDK and XCode and the Android SDK and Eclipse, respectively. You can use the emulators, which are normally used for app testing, to run the mobile browser on the fake device on your PC, which will give you a more real-world way of testing the site's look as well as touch functionality inherent in mobile browsers.
Visual Studio. Especially Visual Studio 2012, highly optimized for mobile web.
Mono Projects for support across platforms (not web app, but regular apps).
Related
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Closed 9 years ago.
I want to make a Desktop App for Linux and I'm wondering if C#/mono is still suitable for that. Do they plan to make a wrapper for GTK 3? Or is Qyoto a better choice? Also, I'm wondering if GTK is a good idea for Ubuntu, since they plan to make their own window server. (Which will use QT if I'm not misinformed...)
Any hint is appreciated.
Is mono still suitable for a Linux Desktop Application
Yes, and a good example of this is the Banshee Media Player.
Do they plan to make a wrapper for GTK 3?
Various people from the community like me are working to make this happen. In fact, there's already a version of GTK# that binds GTK+ 3.x, it's a preview version labeled as "2.99".
Or is Qyoto a better choice?
Not sure about this. I don't know of any key app that uses this, although the binding seems to be maintained and kicking. Something tells me that there's still lots of work in progress and things to do in this area though, because Qt is C++ and it is hard to bind it from C#. But there are very recent developments to fix these issues which are very promising, such as CppSharp.
Also, I'm wondering if GTK is a good idea for Ubuntu, since they plan to make their own window server. (Which will use Qt if I'm not misinformed...)
You're misinformed. Canonical's Mir project is one level of abstraction lower than what you're thinking: it intends to replace X11, in a similar way Wayland does. And both gtk+ and Qt run on top of X11.
That being said, if you're very cautious about selecting the wrong option, you could use the XWT toolkit, which abstracts you completely from the toolkit in each platform. This way, you would just need to implement a Qt backend (for XWT) in the future in case you want to stop using GTK+ in the Linux platform.
You can use Qt or GTK on KDE or Gnome DEs, what the DE uses is irrelevant to your application because the system will have both sets of libraries available anyway. The advantage to Qt is that you have an easy migration path to other platforms.
I personally would stay away from Mono, it is still available on all major distros, but has a reputation for poor stability. It is also incomplete, and they haven't shipped a new release since December 2011... For example on the distro I use, openSUSE, it is significant that the Mono runtime and bindings are not installed by default - unlike most other big VM/interpreted languages (Python and Java for example).
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Closed 10 years ago.
As a web developer I've discovered the joys of working with KnockoutJS lately but when it comes to working with the server I'm pretty much left on my own. I've considered BreezeJS and JayData for their CRUD capabilities and batch operations but I'm still not sure on which one suits me best.
I'm focused on ASP.NET MVC development with EF right now but I might switch to other platforms later and so I'd prefer not to be restricted to one particular framework. In this respect JayData offers a number of providers over BreezeJS like OData, webSQL, IndexedDB, localStore, Facebook and YQL which is almost overwhelming. BreezeJS does support OData however but only for consumption.
But how about ease of use, documentation and other crucial features which I might not have thought of?
Thanks for your help in helping me choose between them.
I'm member of JayData dev team, but I've tried Breeze, too.
Comparing them by the easy of use would be subjective, it depends on your taste. The intention of these libraries are the same: protect the developer from implementing protocol and concentrate on data management. But JayData isn't just a ORM library, but a unified data management paradigm and tool, which can be used on the server-side to build your own PaaS/BaaS.
As JayData was published in May 2012 with the provider-model, we had more time to implement more data providers (you missed the MongoDB on server-side and WebAPI, which will be released in few days) and support many developer platforms. I would mention the TypeScript support and the online-offline capability thanks to the unified API, which is important if you want to use the library now.
Breeze has also nice features on the roadmap and I'm sure you it will be a useful library in general, not just for consuming WebAPI services in a comfortable way.
The documentations is more or less the same, both team offer enterprise and community support.
If you only want to access WebAPI from JavaScript, I would pick the library depending on my prefered UI library/templating engine:
Breeze: Knockout, Angular, Backbone (Hopefully Breeze guys will update this with insider news)
JayData: Knockout (with dynamic queries), Angular (tutorial on the way), Handlebars, Sencha (read-only), KendoUI (comes in few days).
Both dev teams are helpful and listening to the tags, so you can ask how could these libraries solve the business problem or meet the technical requirements of your project.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I was looking for some current opinions on WPF based on their 4.0 release.
We are trying to decide if we want a Desktop application with a WCF server, or if we want an ASP.Net web app. I would really like to do it in WPF, however some major concerns have come up that I am not sure if WPF can handle. I have looked around online and a lot of WPF reviews are based on the 3.5 version, so I was looking for some current opinions.
What sort of Support is out there for it? Microsoft support and Community? Is WPF a dying technology or a growing one?
It is harder to find WPF programmers. Is this always going to be the case?
What is the performance like for terminal services? The majority of our users login using WYSE thin-clients to a Windows 2003 terminal server. Each server normally has between 10 and 30 people on it on any given day. Most of our TS users only need basic view/insert/update abilities and our admin staff needs the more advanced features and reporting. The admin users all have XP machines with SP2 or higher.
What other concerns should I have about WPF?
It seems the underlying concern here is whether or not WPF is a mature enough technology for serious desktop application development. The answer there is IMHO certainly yes and the proof I offer is Visual Studio 2010. It is written in WPF, is a major desktop application and has to meet the criteria laid out in your question.
To attempt to head off the 2010 is slow + buggy argument. Yes, 2010 is not a perfect product and has bugs. The vast majority of those problems are not purely a WPF issue but instead are related to legacy code, managed native interop or just interesting interactions between old and new technology.
To answer some of the non-technical questions with hand wavy answers ...
Yes today it's probably harder to find WPF programmers than say WinForm programmers. WPF is a newer technology and hence likely won't have as many developers. Will this be true in the future will only be decided in the future :)
I feel like there is great support for WPF (see the WPF tag on this site for an example). When I started doing WPF work for the 2010 release the vast majority of the questions I had were already answered on this site or in blog tutorials.
#1 - I've done projects with WPF. There is quite a bit of information out there. Microsoft seems to be investing more in Silverlight at the moment, but I suspect that WPF and Silverlight will be merged in the coming years. WPF/Silverlight/XAML will be Microsoft's way of building desktop apps for the foreseeable future.
#2 - Developers with good WPF (or Silverlight) skills are hard to find, though not impossible. WPF/Silverlight definitely has a steep learning curve.
#3 - There have been problems with WPF apps running on terminal server because WPF runs on top of DirectX. I would definitely try running a WPF app on your Windows Server 2003 terminal server to see how it behaves. My biggest concern would be that Microsoft would likely be investing in any WPF-related fixes for Server 2008 TS and I'm not sure they would necessarily port those to Server 2003. As for a good test app, I would grab something like the WPF photo viewer demo (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms771331%28VS.90%29.aspx). Something reasonably graphically intensive to stress TS.
#4 - Personally #3 is the biggest concern IMHO. If you can't run on Windows Server 2003 TS, the other questions are moot.
Concern #1: What sort of Support
So far, it's growing and growing well. The IDE support is finally decent as of VS2010, and it appears as though MS is going to be pushing this for a good amount of time. There are lost of examples from MS and the community.
Concern #2: It is harder to find WPF programmers.
Well, it depends on how crazy you want to get with your UI. If you want the latest, greatest whiz bang 3D animations and multiple effects, it might be difficult to find someone off the street with all of those skills that you can afford. However, if you're banging out a relatively simple UI, many experienced developers can quickly grow into this role.
Concern #3: What is the performance like for terminal services?
That depends on how much animation and other whiz bang features you want to add. If there is lots happening on the screen, it will take more bandwidth. Once again, a simple interface should have no problems.
Concern #4: What other concerns should I have about WPF?
Hard to say!
There is always a risk that a technology will become obsolete. That's just the way it is. And there's no way to know for sure.
Here is a possible scenario: WPF is being overshadowed by Silverlight, since everyone wants to "do it on the web." You decide to develop your application in Silverlight (even though it's only a subset of WPF's feature set) and get blindsided by HTML 5, which takes over the world because now you can do everything in the browser without a plugin. Even Flash becomes obsolete.
Will it happen? Who knows?
People are still quite happily making Winforms applications, arguably an obsolete technology. Are they worried about obsolescence? Probably not.
As far as I know, Microsoft actively and enthusiastically supports this technology. If you are concerned about performance and other issues, the best way to find out if it meets your needs is to build a prototype.
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Closed 10 years ago.
As the title reads, I'm looking for open source alternatives to balsamiq mockup for prototyping. Anyone knows of an equally good alternative that's open source or basically freeware.
The best available Open source mock up tool is Pencil. Its available as firefox plugin as well as stand alone.
Another solution, which I personally use is Inkscape, an open source SVG Editor. It is NOT a mock up designer, but we can use it for designing mock ups, using freely available stencil kit, like Yahoo Stencil Kit.
Mockingbird is free during beta
Firefox's pencil add-on is free forever
Take a look at Maqetta. It runs as a html5 app in your browser, so you can deploy it on your server to easily share your work with others, or you can simply start it locally and point your browser to localhost on port 50000.
On their homepage, you can test maqetta online (after registering), or download a package that contains everything needed to run it locally.
Resources:
Homepage
Repository on github
WireframeSketcher is not open-source but it's free for open-source developers. WireframeSketcher helps you quickly create wireframes, mockups and prototypes for desktop, web and mobile applications. It comes both as a standalone version and as a plug-in for Eclipse IDEs. It has some distinctive features like storyboards, components, linking and vector PDF export. Among supported IDEs are are Aptana, Flash Builder, Zend Studio and Rational Application Developer.
(source: wireframesketcher.com)
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Closed 10 years ago.
What is the best load testing tool for ASP.NET applications?
Probably WCAT as it is MS and will give you shed load of Windows based metrics. WCAT
However Jmeter (Java FOSS) is top notch Apache Jmeter
And Selenium while not strictly a stress testing tool has many other testing features. SeleniumHQ
As i say WCAT if you are MS based is probably the best but worth casting your eye over Jmeter. Selenium is a FireFox plugin and does other testing that might interest you.
I'm fond of Siege for any HTTP load testing, or of course there's the classic ab.
Visual Studio Test Edition 2010 or any of the other SKU's that give you access to those tools.
The prices have just come out in Ed Glas's blog here.
This tool also appears in Visual Studio 2008.
The loadtesting tools that come with Visual Studio come with a great set of objects for manipulating tests. The test recording is great and Fiddler2 will record test as well.
It integrates well with your favorite ASP.Net dev environment... Okay, lame joke.
The results can be stored in a database with little effort and all perfmon stats are available for selection if required.
This is the tool for ASP.Net apps and I would use it for a Java site if I had to.
It is scalable in that Visual Studio itself can generate load for 250 virtual users (enough to bring your dev machine to it's knees). You can buy the licence for extra users to really get your "distributed denial of service" on.
There is one tool here that you can give a try.
Here is a good article that I've read recently.