What I Learned from PDC - Domain Technologies (continued)

Controller Model: All the commanding and navigation instructions are implemented at this level. Think of this layer as reacting to menu clicks, hyperlinks or changes of URL address. The controller is one of the central models in ASP.NET MVC (Model View Controller) and in a good implementation will defer many of the control logic decisions to the domain model. In ASP.NET MVC, the controller is used to return a view based on an action, and will typically consult the model to do so. In other applications the controller is not as pronounced, however there are usually classes that expose functions to act as command targets.

Talking Points: Exposing ICommand for Silverlight has simplified the implementation of a control pattern. Best examples using the controller pattern are FT59: ASP.NET MVC 2: Ninjas Still on Fire Black Belt Tips by Scott Hanselman, FT22: Microsoft ASP.NET MVC 2: The New Stuff by Stephen Walther, CL22: Advanced Topics for Building Large-Scale Applications with Microsoft Silverlight by John Papa and CL21: Building Amazing Business Applications with Microsoft Silverlight and Microsoft .NET RIA Services by Brad Abrams. None of these talks show you how to build a controller, but they all use an MVC pattern to build their application.

Data Proxy: The Data Proxy layer is a service oriented architecture (SOA) where the communication is with a data source. There is no limit to the data proxies in this layer. In fact there is no limit to the number services your domain can subscribe or publish to. Proxies can be generated automatically by querying metadata about the WCF service. Proxies are class based representations that model the WCF services API. The abstraction is so good, you are hardly aware that you are using a service on a remote server as you program. Proxies can be generated for anything that has a communication contract. The contract is typically expressed in metadata and there are tools for translating the metadata into code that implements the contract explicitly.

This layer is all about communication. The pictures above were taken from Yavor Georgiev’s talk: CL06: Networking and Web Services in Silverlight. The first picture shows the technology layers that .NET WCF provides. The programming model is built over a TCP/IP based protocol. The second picture shows the spectrum of communication applications. Yavor discusses the interaction between communication and different types of applications, from transactional data systems to multicast video systems. Generally speaking, WCF RIA services is the Microsoft technology of choice for building Silverlight rich clients and there are several talks showing this.

Talking Points: See FT12: ADO.NET Data Services: What’s new with the RESTful data services framework Pablo Castro’s client demo (at 44 min in). For an intro to RIA services: CL21: Building Amazing Business Applications with Microsoft Silverlight and Microsoft .NET RIA Services with Brad Abrams. You can tell from this talk the Microsoft is shaping this technology to create Line of Business CRUD applications. You can dive below the surface with CL07: Mastering Microsoft .NET RIA Services.