Since 2010, we’ve partnered with IdeaBlade to provide our customers with a comprehensive and robust solution for building highly scalable line-of-business applications. The successful integration between IdeaBlade’s DevForce and our flagship ClientUI toolset significantly improves developer’s productivity – allowing them to leverage the MVVM pattern to build beautiful interface and at the same time enjoying the client-side LINQ query capability as well as many other advanced features available in DevForce.
As DevForce 2012 is now officially released to the market, we’re committed to continue supporting the latest DevForce version and leverage its new features in our toolset. DevForce 2012 is the sevent-generation of the DevForce n-tier architecture released by IdeaBlade. This version has supported some noteworthy features such as .NET 4.5 asynchronous programming support, Entity Framework 5 support, and Windows Store Apps support. For more details, please visit DevForce 2012 information page.
DevForce 2012 Support
The latest suite of Intersoft WebUI Studio 2012 R2 ships with DevForce 2010 (version 6.1.7.0). In the next release, we’ll include full support for DevForce 2012. However, we’ll make available the new DevForce 2012 support assemblies so you can start using them today. In this blog post, I’ll share how to implement DevForce 2012 support in your existing applications.
We provide two kind of support for DevForce 2012 which are detailed in the following sections.
Using Backward Compatibility
This solution is intended for existing DevForce 2010 .NET and Silverlight projects which uses the “operation/callback” asynchronous API.
Migrating from existing DevForce 2010 projects to DevForce 2012 are made easy by applying the following rule.
- Add a using/Imports statement to your code file for IdeaBlade.EntityModel.Compat.
- Add a using/Imports statement to your code file for the new Intersoft data provider of DevForce 2012, Intersoft.Client.Data.Provider.DevForce2012.
- Add a using/Imports statement of Intersoft.Client.Data.Provider.DevForce2012.Compatibility.
With this approach, you don’t need to change a single line of code in your project, while enjoying the benefits and new features available in DevForce 2012 and Entity Framework 5. I recommend you to go with this approach if your existing application is considerably large and you prefer to do the transition in progressive fashion.
Click here to browse the sample project which was created using Intersoft ClientUI MVVM Data Application using DevForce 2010. The project was later modified by migrating the DevForce 2010 to DevForce 2012.
Using Native DevForce 2012 API
Asynchronous patterns
The Task-based Asynchronous Pattern (TAP) is based on the Task and Task<TResult> types in the System.Threading.Tasks namespace, which are used to represent arbitrary asynchronous operations. TAP is the recommended asynchronous design pattern for new development.
DevForce 2012 has implemented the use of TAP. By implementing this, we are able to use the await keyword, which makes asynchronous method calls feel synchronous when we’re writing code.
Instead of writing callback, lambda expressions, or coroutines, we now use await. Here is an example about the implementation of await.
Using lambda expression in DevForce 2010
public virtual void GetData(Action<IEnumerable> onSuccess, Action<Exception> onFail)
{
if (Intersoft.Client.Framework.ISControl.IsInDesignModeStatic)
return;
var query = this.EntityQuery;
query.ExecuteAsync(
op =>
{
if (op.CompletedSuccessfully)
{
if (onSuccess != null)
onSuccess(op.Results);
}
else
{
if (onFail != null)
{
op.MarkErrorAsHandled();
onFail(op.Error);
}
}
});
}
Using await in DevForce 2012
public virtual async Task<IEnumerable> GetData()
{
if (Intersoft.Client.Framework.ISControl.IsInDesignModeStatic)
return null;
var query = this.EntityQuery;
IEnumerable results = await query.ExecuteAsync();
return results;
}
GetData() method which previously doesn’t return anything (void) now returns Task. The lambda expression is replaced with following line of code.
IEnumerable results = await query.ExecuteAsync(); return results;
onSuccess and onFail parameters – the callback to invoke when the operation succeeded or failed – are no longer available. You handle them in the same way and manner as you wrote synchronous code, that is by wrapping them in a try-catch syntax.
We now provide a new version of DevForce data provider that supports async and await operations which conforms to DevForce 2012 native API. For example, you can now use the following code to query a list of customers from the repository.
private async void LoadCustomers()
{
try
{
var customers = await this.CustomersSource.GetData();
this.Customers = customers;
this.IsCustomersLoaded = true;
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
this.Presenter.ShowErrorMessage(
"An exception has occurred during data loading\n." +
"Message: " + ex.Message +
"Stack Trace: " + ex.StackTrace);
}
}
Click here to browse the sample project in github which was created using Intersoft ClientUI MVVM Data Application using DevForce 2012. Note that the new DevForce support assemblies can be found in the sample project.
Definitely there are so much exciting stuff in the continuing collaboration of ClientUI and DevForce 2012. Let me know if you have any questions or feedback about the DevForce 2012 support, or how we can improve it better for you.
Warm Regards,
Yudi
Intersoft Solutions Corporate Blog 