Video Tutorials: Understanding Data Access Design Patterns in Crosslight

When building applications, I always encourage the team in-charge, to look up and apply the appropriate design patterns for the application.

In our latest release (Crosslight 2), we introduced several new services such as RestClient, SQLite, EntityContextProvider, EntityContainer, etc, enabling you to easily create data aware apps across multiple mobile platforms.

These are the tools that can get the job done. However using all these services without applying design patterns can make your code redundant and much harder to manage.

I’ve created a video explaining several new design patterns to tackle data access challenges using Crosslight. Check it out below.

These design patterns are also extensively used in our Enterprise App Framework. In the next video, I’ll show you how to create data aware application from scratch using the new tools provided in Crosslight 2 and Enterprise App Framework which leverage the design patterns you just learn in this video.

To learn how to work with data using Crosslight, see our online documentation at
http://developer.intersoftpt.com/display/crosslight/Working+with+Data

With Regards,
Andry

Video Tutorials: Creating Business App Using Crosslight Project Wizard

In this new v2 release, the Crosslight Project Wizard now sports a powerful business app template that will greatly accelerate your mobile development experience. The business template leverages the Intersoft App Framework, comprehensive use of the RestClient with the repository pattern for streamlined data retrieval, navigation drawer, latest Entity Framework 6 and MVC 5 support, pull-to-refresh, incremental loading and much more.

Check out the video below to learn to see how to take advantage of the new business template in easy-to-understand fashion.

To learn more about Crosslight, visit our new Developer Center. Here you can find comprehensive details on how Crosslight works, complete with illustrated diagrams and design patterns to leverage Crosslight to its maximum potential. Grab a copy of Crosslight and try it today!

Cheers,
Nicholas Lie

Announcing the New Community and ClientUI Website

The Intersoft 2014 release delivers not only a great deal of tools, but also a multitude of new range and improved services dedicated to all our customers. You can read about our 2014 release highlight and introduction of our new Developer Center and Git Center here.

In this blog post, I want to share several important services that we have launched together with the 2014 release. This includes the revamped community portal, now with ability to submit product feedback and report bugs which I’m sure you’ll find them really useful. In addition, we have also launched a brand-new, completely redesigned ClientUI website.

Improvements to Intersoft Community

We are proud to bring you the new face of our community portal. You will see cleaner and more elegant user interface design based on the Intersoft’s user experiences which results to more intuitive navigation and easier access to most important functions like search, starting a new thread, and more.

When you visit the community home, you will now see the new design such as seen below.

The text editing experience has also been significantly improved. It now sports a modern interface for the text editor with improved performance. Furthermore, the file upload component integrated to the editor has been significantly improved in this release. You can now upload files in the background asynchronously with no more file corruption. The file upload component has also supported the latest Safari for Windows and Mac as well as IE 11 which use special multipart specifications.

Introducing New Product Feedback

One of the major improvements that our web team have been working with in the past months is the ability to let our customers easily submit product feedback and bug report. We put user experiences at our top most priority and concern. We definitely do not want our customers to re-login to a different site just to submit feedback or report bugs – unlike many other vendors which simply rolling out a separate site with disjointed experiences.

That said, I’m thrilled to announce the launch of our new product feedback system – built right into the heart of our community experience.

In addition to questions or discussion, you can now post product feedback including Feature Request or Bug Submission – all from the community site. You can quickly start from creating new discussion through the button such as shown below, then choose the thread type. It’s so simple and easy.

Alternatively, you can also easily find the product feedback option in the thread list or thread detail page through the Create New drop down.

See the following screenshot.

Once you arrived to the product feedback page, you can choose the feedback type, whether it is a bug submission or a feature request. You will also see a specialized form dedicated for this new product feedback type, such as the development environment information, operating system, product builds, and more.

The text editor will also automatically transform into multiple-section editor where you can conveniently fill in the steps to reproduce, description, and more – all in a beautiful text editor interface.

Another interesting feature we added is “Like this”. You can put “Like” on the thread which you think provide helpful solution for your problems. This will help us analyzing and evaluating the product feedback you submitted. Ultimately, we hope that you enjoy many of these new improvements which give you greater experience to work with us and the Intersoft’s community.

ClientUI Website Redesigned with Authentic Intersoft Experiences

As if it weren’t enough, this release also includes a major redesign to our ClientUI website to celebrate the 10th major release of our Silverlight and WPF product lineup.

You can now browse and discover all ClientUI controls with simple, clean and elegant look and feel. Consistent with Intersoft’s authentic experiences, you can now easily navigate to different part of the sites thanks to the smooth floating toolbar. The translucent design lets you focus better on content and brings you a more comfortable way to interact with the website such as searching information, accessing to the download or buy button, and so on.

The major redesign of the ClientUI website includes full support for Retina display with true HD quality. You can view all images in any Retina or HD devices without compromised image quality or distortion. Featured Showcase and navigation controls have been totally revamped to show all rich features that you will be interested to see.

We also revamped our navigation for all controls. The new navigation is placed at the top, no longer at the left side. With this design, you can learn quickly discover the key features available in each component. To experience it directly yourself, please visit the new ClientUI website here.

Last but not least, we hope you enjoyed all these new, exciting improvements. We are striving to create the world’s best products with the most excellent services and support. Again, thank you for your feedback and continuous support so far!

Cheers,

Handy 

Intersoft Premier Studio 2014 is here!

Today, we’re very excited to deliver our most anticipated release yet. Shipping over 200 new features and a multitude of enhancements across all 7 platforms, the new 2014 release is our latest masterpiece dedicated to all our customers worldwide. Thank you for all your feedback and support! You can download the new 2014 product bits here.

In addition to new products, this release also marks several important launches for new kind of services that we’ve been working on these past months. In this blog post, I will share some key highlights of the new products and services.

Premier 2014 Highlights

As planned in our roadmap, the Premier 2014 is strongly focused on Crosslight 2, a major release of our development tools for cross-platform mobile development. Building on solid architecture on top of Microsoft and Xamarin technologies, Crosslight 2 features a vast array of powerful components and services that makes cross-platform enterprise apps development truly a breeze.

Some key highlights of the new features in Crosslight 2 are the comprehensive data access services which cover most data access strategies typically used in mobile apps. You can now easily display data from a remote source and update them back through REST service. Alternatively, you can also load data from a local database which is supported through our advanced SQLite API. Or even better, you can combine both strategies and use two-way synchronization service to sync offline and server changes seamlessly. Best of all, everything can be programmed in the shared ViewModel with just a few line of code. Strictly no tedious platform-specific code is required.

Crosslight 2 ships 200+ new features including frameworks, services and UI components across all platforms.

Of course, there are still a lot of great features that you should try yourself, from social network integration, unified push notifications, async image loader, pull-to-refresh, to advanced master-detail UI component and sophisticated drawer navigation. Keep in mind that all these features are fully supported on iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Click here to find out more.

ClientUI for Silverlight and WPF, now upgraded to v10, includes dozens of new features for the Reporting lineup. It now comes with over 150 beautiful, professionally-designed report samples. And you’re really going to love this: the report viewer for Crosslight is also shipped in this release. So yup, you can now build some great apps and let users view reports on-the-go. Learn more about the new ClientUI Reporting here.

Beautiful, professional-designed report samples are now available for your references.

ASP.NET product lineup also receives great improvements. Your web apps should run much faster with the enhanced ASP.NET components, thanks to the much reduced Javascript files, now 40% smaller than the previous version. This improvement applies to all 40+ components, so you can enjoy significantly faster and more responsive web apps.

Introducing Intersoft Developer Center

At Intersoft, we strived to create and release only the best-quality products. But, great products without comprehensive documentation isn’t so great. That said, we’re so excited to announce the launch of our new developer-centric portal where you can now find comprehensive documentation of our products, all in a single, intuitive web interface.

Comprehensive developer-focused content in an intuitive web interface lets you conveniently learn and master Intersoft’s products.

Unlike other help platforms, our Developer Center is designed with an advanced integrated workflow that allows truly agile product release cycle. Documentation API is automatically published in realtime with each class and member seamlessly linked to the conceptual topics, slashing two third of the time compared to our previous release workflow. You can also watch for certain pages you are interested in, and get updates when the pages are updated.

In this launch, the Crosslight product documentation in the new Developer Center is officially released. You will find in-depth conceptual topics, sample code, videos, learning resources, and much more. Visit Intersoft Developer Center now.

Introducing Intersoft Git Server

When downloading our new product setup, you will notice significantly smaller download size. The mobile studio is now only 65 MB, down from 110 MB. Due to our improved agile workflows which emphasize on shorter release cycle and efficient delivery , the setup no longer include offline samples.

The good news is that we now have a better place to host all our fast-evolving product samples. Introducing Intersoft’s own enterprise-grade Git server, you can easily find new code and samples right from your browser. Even better, if you’re familiar with Git, you can simply open the terminal or command prompt, then clone the sample projects in a single command.

Easily browse samples from Intersoft’s online code repository

With the new Git server, this also marks an important breakthrough in the way we release our products. With our recent transition to an advanced GitFlow working model, you can easily find out what features we are working on, and what new samples we are currently preparing. You can easily switch branch and get yourself the latest development bits to give it a try.

More importantly, we are now starting to adopt open-source initiatives to contribute back to the our customers and community. Our first open-source project is the Crosslight enterprise app framework which provides design pattern, reusable libraries and best practices for building enterprise apps rapidly. In addition, code samples for technical support will now be published — all hosted in the new Git Server. Click here to visit Intersoft Git server, and here for the instructions to get started with Crosslight samples hosted on the Git server.

Update 5/12/2014: Please download the recently updated installer which includes a number of improvements made to the Crosslight Project Wizard such as automatic web server detection for business template and improved overall experience.

What’s Next

More exciting Crosslight reference samples will be made available soon. You can also expect series of blogs and tutorial videos discussing the new features available in Crosslight 2. Also, stay tuned for our upcoming webinar.

Last but not least, I hope you enjoyed our new products and the comprehensive, much improved services. Again, if you have not started your download, click here to get the new bits right now.

Best,
Jimmy

Introducing the New Team Developer in Intersoft Web

Last year, we successfully redesigned our website and brought account management together in a single, authentic Intersoft experience. Today, I’m pleased to announce that we’ve completed a major milestone in our roadmap to migrate Developer Network to the main Intersoft’s website which features greater usability and latest web standards support such as HTML5 and CSS3.

Introducing the all-new, redesigned Team Developer, you can now easily manage the licenses for your developer team, create new company account for your team, assign and remove subscriptions for your team, and quickly review the summary of your licenses such as the total and occupied licenses. Now, you can also see your account and license information through mobile, so you don’t have to question on its portability. Finally, you can also delegate the Developer Manager role to someone in your team, if you prefer.

Let’s tour the new Team Developer!

Team and Licenses Management Simplified.

The all-new Team Management is now fully integrated to the Intersoft Account portal under the Team tab which can be easily enabled if you’ve purchased multiple licenses. It features an intuitive and easy-to-use interface that conforms to Intersoft’s aesthetic standards, allowing you to conveniently manage your licenses and team developers in a much streamlined interface.

With just a button click, you can easily add your developer into the team, or remove them as they’re no longer in charge. You’ll be presented with a new account dialog – now revamped with only important fields in cleaner interface, such as shown below.

Once registered, the Team Management smartly detect available licenses that can be assigned to the new member. You can  now simply check the subscriptions or individual licenses, and tap the Assign button to finish. It’s that easy – see the following illustration.

Streamlined Corporate Info Management.

If you have not registered as Developer Manager, you will need to enable your account as Developer Manager and setup corporate information before you can add members to your team. Setting up the corporate information is now easy and painless – thanks to the clean, intuitive form design which now shows only relevant fields. The new corporate information screen can be seen below.

As seen in the above illustration, you can delegate the developer manager role to the other registered team member if you prefer. However, once you delegated the role, you are no longer able to manage the Team Developer as you are no longer the ‘Developer Manager’.

In the last section of the page, you can now easily review the ‘License Summary’ which shows information the total licenses that you have under your team. The summary will also show the amount of available and occupied licenses. This will help you in distributing the licenses effectively among the members.

As you see above, the new Team Developer features incredibly intuitive user experience with modern look and feel. Everything is thoughtfully designed – from the icons, styles, and layout. You can easily add product or remove it by simply hover on the item in the list.

In this redesign, a lot of unnecessary and tedious steps have been removed. Our goal is to make it easy and simple for you to manage your account and licenses for your development team. I hope you loved the new Team Developer as much as we love building it.