Hi, Hello and Welcome
New year, new resolution, new spirit, new attitude.
So here am I starting my own blog, and since currently i’m working for Intersoft Solutions and been very busy and also excited with the progress in our development area. I’ll dedicated most of the pages to update all of you with latest info right from the back office.
We’re going to launch CTP release for two new products in 2009 which are Intersoft Solutions Data Source for Silverlight and Intersoft Solutions Presenter for Silverlight quite soon (if everything goes well, by the end of next week you can download the preview right away).
And along with this CTP release, i’ll covers some of the concept behind the product along with the exicting features that we already had, so stay tune.
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Mr WordPress
January 24, 2009 at 2:34 am
Hi;
I’m currently a Microsoft Silverlight/WPF Insider and
I’m very interested about your DataSource and data presenter and would to get a hold of your release to work with and test the product. Could you or Jimmy or whoever is in charge to contact me.
Micnet@Ix.Netcom.Com
When do you expet the RTW of these two products? And is each in a seperate DLL?
Thanks!
..Ben
Ben Hayat
January 26, 2009 at 3:51 pm
Hi Ben, i promised i’ll let the person in charge notify you when the CTP is released, or any other released
For the RTW we’re planning to released it around March and yes it will be two separate dll(s) one for Data Source and one for Data Presenter Manager.
I’ll update this blog quite often when the CTP is released, and don’t hesitate to give any feedback after you played with it.
Regards
Andry
ansoesil
January 26, 2009 at 11:52 pm
Andry, are you guys on Silverlight Insider or TAP program?
And thank you for your promise, I’ll hold you up to it
But seriously, I’m very interested to use it in a real project and give you feedback.
How solid and finish the API is? Do you think most of the API is going to stay the same till RTW?
Do we still need to use the client side of Asoria?
Is your product a front end to Astoria’s client or replacement?
If it is a front-end we still get all the benefits of Astoria’s client side, converting all the LINQ to URI for us.
I’ve been waiting for this. Anyway, start giving us all the juicy details
..Ben
Ben Hayat
January 27, 2009 at 3:19 am
Hi Ben,
Hmm nope we are not in Silverlight Insider Program or TAP Program, not that i know of.
Haha thanks for your interest, we just need to do some finalization thing for the CTP, please be patient
Most of the main API will stay the same unless there are major things that need to be adjusted.
To answer your question about the Astoria:
We have a control called an Astoria Data Source, which basically an intermediary control between any fronts ends to actual Astoria Data Service.
In short we use this Astoria Data Source to control the Data Transactions (e.g. Sorting, Filtering, Paging) between Intersoft Presenter and the actual Astoria Data Service.
So its not a replacement to Astoria Client, in fact it’s just an extension so that our Intersoft Presenter can be establish in more fashion time.
In brief here’s the work flow:
Intersoft Presenter [generate the data transaction info based on the latest action / state] –>
Astoria Data Source [compile the data transaction info to Astoria's query string] –> {INTERUPT-ABLE}
Astoria Data Service [ process the query string and returns the data ] –> {INTERUPT-ABLE}
Astoria Data Source –> Intersoft Presenter.
You can also interrupt the process at two points, one is before Astoria Data Source sending info to Astoria Data Service [you can interrupt, add or remove more info, or entirely discard the default approach and use your own LINQ query here],
And the other one is when Astoria Data Service has completed sending the data requested [you can manipulate the data again using LINQ].
I hope this make sense, and give some preview a little bit.
I know that it’s hard to prove when there is nothing to be checked on to. So I’ll wrap this answer in more detail in one of my posting later on
Regards
Andry
ansoesil
January 27, 2009 at 3:27 pm
This sounds very nice and natural to me. It’s good that you took the client base of Astoria and extended it. This way, for next version of Astoria client, we can just move on.
I clearly understood your wokflow steps, but that raised several questions:
a) Can any front end bindable UI Like MS grid or your data presenter or other third party UI work with your datasource?
b) Which means your datasouce will implement all the notification interface and we don’t need to that?
c) If I understand you correctly, you’re also providing us with some help on the Astoria server side. If yes, have you thought about incorporating some sort of compression or binary data format to reduce size of data to be transferred and to by able to encrypt the data?
I like the locations of interruptions.
I just conversed with Jimmy via email and I would like to get your email as well.
Thanks for the answers!
..Ben
Ben Hayat
January 27, 2009 at 3:55 pm
a) The answer is no and partial yes.
No because, the data source is just the intermediary control, means that there should be a front end that supply the information needed to the data source control so that it can perform its intended tasks fully.
For example: Filtering process. The data bound need to generate the information that need to be passed to data source control by inspecting the latest state or action.
So in a sense only Intersoft Presenter(tm) and upcoming IDataBound controls from Intersoft will have the full integration with Intersoft Data Source(tm).
Partial yes, because you can still use the data source control to extract data from intended source and get the return value during Selected event handler (for WCF and Astoria) or directly when you call Select method (for XML data source). Since its returns IEnumerable type, you can assign it to any data bound control.
Note also that you still get the benefit of centralized management of data service declarations if you do use Wcf or Astoria data source.
b) Its not the data source that implements the interface, buts its the other way around the data bound control implements IDataBound which contains DataSourceID, DataMember, etc and do the necessary action to call and supply the info to the Data Source Control.
c) Hmm i don’t think we have any additional value in Astoria server side at this point. What we do however is to generate the desired query based on the latest state in Intersoft Presenter and then send it to Astoria Data Service through our Data Source control.
About the compression, i haven’t dig deep about this yet, but surely it would be great if we can compress it again. This is anyway the ultimate goal that we want to achieve right? Less byte transfer to the web.
One thing that i know though is that Astoria support JSON format which i think a little bit wiser in term of bytes rather than the ATOM / XML
Regards
Andry
ansoesil
January 28, 2009 at 5:54 am
Andry, you answer question very clearly and I’m sure other readers will benefits from your answers.
I fully understand your position on (a) situation. So, is the presenter a data grid as well? Can it be used as a data grid? And secondly, since you don’t have Idatabound editors/controls yet, does this mean, we can’t use the std SL editors with DataSource to build an app?
On (b) I apologize, made a mistake with my question.
On (c), I see the Atom can get very large, so some form of compression would be great. Something to think about!
Thanks!
..Ben
Ben Hayat
January 28, 2009 at 2:14 pm
Hi Ben
For (a) i think you got me wrong here.
Intersoft Presenter ™ contains four presenter, and a manager. One of the presenter is in a form of data grid. And all of this controls implement the IDataBound that i mentioned before.
“So, is the presenter a data grid as well?” yes but its something more
“And secondly, since you don’t have Idatabound editors/controls yet, does this mean, we can’t use the std SL editors with DataSource to build an app?”
You can use the Intersoft Data Source to supply any data for any controls actually, the difference is that in Intersoft’s IDataBound controls everything will be taken care manually, generating the query, generating the sort expression and so on.
In a sense its more like how the ASP.NET Data Source control concept works.
I’ll post something about using Intersoft Data Source to any Silverlight std controls later on, hopefully this will clear your doubt
Regards
Andry
ansoesil
January 29, 2009 at 12:33 am
>>I’ll post something about using Intersoft Data Source to any Silverlight std controls later on, hopefully this will clear your doubt<<
Could you please create an online demo that basically shows a full CRUD operations using std edit controls with two-way binding?
BTW, did you say, the full edit controls are coming next week?
Thanks Andry;
Ben Hayat
January 29, 2009 at 4:28 am
Hi Ben
I’ll post the demo that shows a full CRUD operations in the next one
Yea we’re but its still preview, not all features has been implemented yet, several i can note are Editing Capabilities, Grouping and Paging.
Regards
Andry
ansoesil
January 30, 2009 at 12:17 pm
Btw we just make the CTP available for all of you.
To get it you can sign up through here http://www.intersoftpt.com/ctp.
ansoesil
January 30, 2009 at 12:18 pm
Just got a chance to look at the demo.
V E R Y N I C E !
Did I say, it looked real nice?
..Ben
Ben Hayat
January 30, 2009 at 3:17 pm
FYI:
http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/01/28/comprehensive-list-of-silverlight-controls.aspx
Ben Hayat
January 30, 2009 at 3:23 pm