Plan for Smart Client Software Factory April Update

 

The Client Team at patterns & practices is planning an update of the Smart Client Software Factory to be released in late April of this year. As usual, we need your feedback on the potential scope for this update. The current plan includes both new functionality, updates currently published on our community site: https://www.codeplex.com/smartclient and a number of usability fixes (especially around recipes).

The plan below will change based upon your feedback so we look forward to your participation!

If there are critical items that you want us to consider please enter them into the issue tracker (https://www.codeplex.com/smartclient/WorkItem/List....). We will constantly monitor the rank of these issues to prioritize our work. We will start the weekly drops on Codeplex in 1 - 2 weeks.

Here is he plan:

New functionality:

Priority 1

WPF Interoperability

- Demonstrate how a Windows Forms Application can host Windows Presentation Foundation Parts

- Create a new View/Presenter recipe for WPF views

Offline Block & Service Agent

- Include support for the scenarios enabled by the Offline Application Block and the Disconnected Service Agent App Block in the Mobile Client Factory.

- Message based off-line support

- Create a Smart Web Reference recipe to support WCF (this is the top requested item on CodePlex)

- Include use of the recently released SQL Compact Edition database for a desktop data store

Recipes

- Provide VB.NET Versions for all recipes

- Update recipes to use the same infrastructure included in the Web Client Software Factory

- Add new recipes for Offline, WCF and WPF

- Use the new GAX February 2007 CTP Release. Note this is not yet available. The new version of GAX will provide better support Microsoft Windows Vista and Visual Studio 2005 SP1.

Priority 2

Windows Workflow Block

- Create a block to support screen flows driven by Workflow Foundation. This would be similar to the Page Flow Application Block in the Web Client Software Factory

- Create a recipe and provide designer support which would also be similar to the support in the Web Client Software Factory

Updates on Codeplex:

We will include the updates that are currently on Codeplex in the Smart Client Software Factory. The updates include:

- Developer and Architect Hands On Labs

- ClickOnce Deployment Chapter and Code that provides more complex scenarios such as rolling out your application to a beta test group

Stay tuned!