What I Learned from PDC - Client Technologies

Client Technologies

There are many different client side technologies in the Microsoft ecosystem, and each has evolved to meet niche markets and end user needs, including video game, business apps, reports, and web page browsing. The defining technology of the client is probably how the view is rendered and the device’s ability to interact with that rendering.

View Rendering: Microsoft provides two different solutions for rendering a GUI: the thin client solution is HTML/JavaScript rendered inside a web browser, the rich client solution is XAML, which can be rendered in a web browser via a Silverlight plug-in, or as part of a thick client application using WPF. So XAML is dual purpose with the caveat that the end user must install the Silverlight plug-in (5 MB, 30 second, one time operation, just like Flash). Simple HTML has more range, because it runs in any browser, but when you start adding CSS and JQuery libraries (and other fancy things) you begin to limit yourself to a subset of browsers, IE7,IE8,Firefox,… again if you can control your target, this is not a problem. The Silverlight plug-in is designed to remove browser incompatibilities and create a UI that is “run anywhere” including Mac and Linux.

Talking Points: FT29: Microsoft AJAX Library, jQuery, and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Stephen Walther, shows how to build thin HTML clients with a new open source AJAX library, including 40 client controls, Open Source.

View Model: The purpose of a View Model is to shape your domain model to a view rendering technology. You must manage the interaction controls, events, value conversion, input validation, and general state of the GUI controls rendering using this model. In WPF/Silverlight, the View Model provides a site to bind the UI to the domain model. Sometimes perceived as additional work by programmers, the decoupling of the view from the domain model actually simplifies the implementation of the client GUI by providing a site for view logic that is independent of the domain. Some good examples are multi-lingual UI’s, currency conversion, hiding sections based on roles, and changing screen presentations based on task, expertise or device size. This separation also makes the application much more testable using an automated test suite.

Talking Points: Newly added ICommand support was the final step in making the view rendering and the view model truly independent and testable. Some Silverlight talks that discuss View Models are Cl19: Building Line of Business Applications with Microsoft Silverlight 4 and John Papa’s talk Cl22: Advanced Topics for Building Large-Scale Applications with Microsoft Silverlight