Model-View-Presenter: Why We Need It and the Basic Pattern (Introduction to CAB/SCSF Part 23)

Introduction Part 22 of this series of articles looked at the Model-View-Controller pattern and discussed how it is one way of structuring a user interface to avoid having too much code behind a screen. This article will examine some of the shortcomings of Model-View-Controller, and describe an alternative, which is Model-View-Presenter. Part 24 of this …

Model-View-Controller Explained (Introduction to CAB/SCSF Part 22)

An Apology, and Topics Still To Be Covered Let me start by apologizing to all the CAB/SCSF fans (?) out there who have been asking me to continue the series of posts. I know it’s been a while since I wrote about the CAB/SCSF (I got diverted by FpML as you can see). However the …

User Interface Design for Business Applications

Introduction This article is going to give a quick tour of the various high-level user interface designs for business applications that need to display multiple windows. It will discuss multiple document interface (MDI), single document interface (SDI) and other paradigms for handling multiple windows. The article will illustrate these concepts by looking at the user …

Introduction to UIExtensionSites (Introduction to the CAB/SCSF Part 13)

Introduction Part 12 of this series of articles went into some detail on events in the Composite Application Block, and concluded our discussions of commands and events. As we’ve already discussed in this series of articles, the Composite Application Block (CAB) is intended as a means of creating smart client applications that are composed of …

Some Thoughts on SOA and Application Design using the CAB/SCSF

Introduction Working with Microsoft’s composite application block framework (CAB) has made me think about application design in a SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) environment. This article is a few thoughts on how we might use the CAB to solve some of the problems associated with creating composite user interfaces in such a service oriented environment. Current …

Composite Application Block MdiWorkspace Sample

Introduction As has been noted on some other blogs, there is no sample provided for the MdiWorkspace in the Composite Application Block. There are a couple of examples elsewhere, but these seem a little overcomplicated, and I had difficulty getting them running. Also there doesn’t seem to be an example that shows how to use …

An Introduction to the Smart Client Software Factory and Composite Application Block: Part 2 WorkItems

Introduction In part 1 of this article I introduced a simple example of how to use Microsoft’s Composite Application Block. To try to keep the example as simple as possible I only covered modules and shells. There are two other core concepts that you need to understand to be able to use even the most …

An Introduction to the Smart Client Software Factory and Composite Application Block: Part 1 Modules and Shells

Introduction Microsoft’s Smart Client Software Factory (SCSF) and associated application blocks are excellent pieces of software. However, for a developer coming to them for the first time they can be extremely daunting. There are many things that can be confusing. Firstly we have modules, workitems, workspaces, and shells, all of which sound similar. Then there’s …

Using HSL Color (Hue, Saturation, Luminosity) to Create Better-Looking GUIs (Part 4)

Continued from part 3. Code Listing The code for this article is available here. It includes the full listing for the HSLColor class discussed in the article. The project has a treeview that lets you select the various colors within the color scheme. It also has the three color schemes described in this article available …

Using HSL Color (Hue, Saturation, Luminosity) to Create Better-Looking GUIs (Part 3)

Continued from part 2 Part 1 and part 2 of this article discussed the hue, saturation, luminosity color model, and created a class, HSLColor, that allowed colors specified using this model to be used in place of the more usual System.Drawing.Color class. Uses of Hue, Saturation, Luminosity So why is the hue, saturation, luminosity color …