After reading a blog post today on the LOB in WPF topic and remembering the countless ones I read before I thought it might be the right time to present the world what I would like to call "the first framework for db-centric line-of-business applications built for WPF": Trivadis Application Builder (TAB). The name already implies that there is more than just a framework.

While there are now powertoys out to create business WPF forms, we are already a step ahead of those. The business forms (master/detail, detail, etc.) in a TAB applications are either created dynamically at runtime without user interaction or XAML code is generated by a wizard at design time (which creates exactly the same XAML as the runtime generator does).

At lot of business application functionality like Lookups, Catalogs, Filters, Sorting, Translation Services, Multi-Layer validation, etc. is available in our framework which implements all of this in a M-V-VM pattern way and tries to force the developer to think in M-V-VM ways.

Take this post as a teaser and come back for the next post in this new TAB series.

BTW: Version 1.0 is out in the wild and is already used in real-life customer projects. For more information concering projects with TAB please go to http://www.trivadis.com

You know the pity: You're once again working on the train and have only a lousy HSDPA or UMTS connection but right a this point in time you would need to debug into the .net source code. You are actually able to get the source code since MSFT released it on 1/16/2008 but in this case your connection is to slow to grab ~10 MB of source files.

Two guys posted a .NET Source Code Mass Downloader on codeplex which might help you in those cases. The mass downloader enables you to download the .net source code while you are on the company's network. After you've once downloaded the source there is no longer any need to download the files for every new debug session separately. Mission accomplished: You can debug into the source on the train even without any connection

Thanks to Kerem Kusmezer and John Robbins for releasing such a wonderful tool.

-t

Brad Abrams wrote about the just released Framework Design Studio. Also there is not that much functionality included right now it already helped me to identify API changes between two milestones in an internal WPF framework we currently work on.

http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2008/04/04/framework-design-studio-published.aspx

In addition to the program itself you can download a 9 pages long excerpt from the book titled Framework Design Guidelines.

-t