So what can we develop?

Posted by: Carl Dickinson | 07 December 2007

I've been thinking for a while about posting to the Mando blog in my role as Head of Programming and Microsoft's release last week of their latest suite of tools for developing applications, Visual Studio 2008 or VS2008, has provided me with the ideal opportunity. Here at Mando we always try to keep abreast of the latest technologies, tools and trends to identify how we can put them to practical use for clients so to track mine and other colleagues familiarisation and experimentation with VS2008 I'm proposing to write a selection of weekly blog entries.
 
I'll try my best to keep them readable for non-techies but the nature of the topics will require a basic understanding of IT. Some of blogs may become a little difficult to follow but please post your comments and I'll reply to answer any specific questions.
 
VS2008 appears to have released some great looking features but more importantly to me some new technologies and tools which should make development easier but still allow us to implement enterprise level applications, which provide great performance, scalabilty, performance and the means of easy maintenance. To experiment with all that's new I'm going to develop and make available a number of applications all with common features but delivering the functionality using different technologies. As my colleagues know I'm a very keen golfer and so that I get something out of the process, which I'll continue to use and make available to friends I'll be developing applications allowing golfers to record their scores, track their progress and compare to other golfers.
 
The technologies and types of applications I'll be developing are:
 
1. A windows forms application. This will not use the web at all and you'll be able to download the installations files and have a standalone application, including the database, installed on your PC.
 
2. A WIndows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application. This will be similar to the first windows application but will utilise Microsoft's WPF technology which permits the generation of richer and more advanced user interface. These types of applications can be deployed and installed on your PC or can run within a browser.
 
3. A Silverlight application. Silverlight is Microsoft's latest method of developing Rich Internet Applications using a subset of the WPF technology it permits the development of desktop like rich applications but run entirely within a browser such as Firefox or Internet Explorer on PCs, Macs and Linux machines.
 
4. An AJAX enabled site. AJAX provides a means of delivering dynamic interfaces to web sites and over the last 5 years hass become very popular but at the expense of accessibility. I'll contrast this to the Silverlight application as they should be similar in many ways.
 
5. A mobile application. This application will be focused on running on WIndows Mobile enabled applications such as phones and PDAs.
 
Each of the applications will reuse common business components or 'back ends' which will be responsible for saving and retrieving details to and from a database. In the first article I'll discuss which new technologies I'll be using to develop theses back end components.
 
For applications 2, 3 and 4 I'll probably make use of web services and look to try out Astoria which is Microsoft's latest method of exposing business functionality for reuse by other clients and applications using the web.
 
I'll be experimenting in my spare time, since I don't want any projects to suffer, so please bear with me if progress is a little slow and subscribe to the RSS feed to make sure you don't miss any new postings.

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