A question or two...

Hi;

Ward did a fantastic job in exploring the V-M-MV with SL and LoB application. The DevForce Framework fits very naturally into this model.

SL3 offers two controls as part of the Ria Services that seem to be a sort of "Middle man" between the view and model and those are the Datasource and the DataPager. They both offer some nice features like sorting, grouping, paing, filtering and etc. In Admin section of most applications, these two controls will be a big time saver.

What I would like to ask and see, how these two controls are supported in DevForce? It would be great to add that to the explorer sample.

Thanks!


Edited by BenHayat - 03-Apr-2009 at 4:08pm

or we may just duplicate the functionality and create our own versions.

I was kind of hesitant to ask for this feature to begin with. The notion of Datasource is too tightly connected to UI which kind of breaks this whole V-M-MV that Ward was showing in the videos. But at the same, the Datasource and datapager are very important to have in a web application, because most of the users have come to expect the datapager paging system that's availble in most sites when looking at large number of rows. So a new generation of website created with Silverlight without this feature will look very odd.
Same thing with Datasource (although that is not so visual to the end user), so we may have to get around it using LINQ statement to do the grouping and filtering for us.

BUT, if you can create those yourself that still works in the same pattern as MVC then that would be the best of both worlds. I really hope this feature is considered as part of your feature list.

Thanks!

Hi Albert;

This morning I saw a blog from Telerik (one of the major and respected UI vendors) that are going to be supporting the DomainDataSource and DataPager. http://blogs.telerik.com/blogs/09-04-16/full_support_for_domaindatasource_with_radgridview_for_silverlight_3.aspx in their their next SP for SL3. And then when you had mentioned that you will either support MS version or write your own, I started to think about another issue and I thought someone on the team can answer that.

I see DevForce is well suited to develop M-V-VM apps from the get go, however these two controls seem to tie the UI and data together which goes against the principle of MVVM patterns. So, my question is, how will you support it that third party grid like Telerik can consume your data and be able to use your DataSource and pager?

Thanks!