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Advanced XAF You Say?

     

So this morning I received an email which basically said

“Hey, stop writing basic stuff on XPO and XAF and start writing about the advanced stuff that I need to know about. The community can look after the noobs, but you need to start looking after those of us who’ve been doing this for a while.”

The author makes a valid point. Although I’m not going to stop writing the XAF and XPO cookbooks for two reasons; firstly, if you are going to write a cookbook it needs to cover everything and that includes the basics to begin with, and secondly, the “community” may not reply to a new customer in quite the tone that DevExpress would hope for, if you know what I mean ;-)

Having said that, there is no reason why I can’t write a more advanced series in parallel and that is what this post is about. The term “advanced topics” doesn’t help me know what information you want. So, would you like to see an article on a particular topic that you consider to be “advanced”? If so, leave a comment and I’ll take a look at it. In the meantime, I replied to the author of the email asking for his top three topics as somewhere for me to start, so look out for this series coming in parallel with the cookbook stuff.

As an aside, what is a more advanced version of a cookbook called? Send me your ideas for a title, there’s no prize, just the honour and the glory of naming the series. :-)

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Published Sep 04 2008, 10:12 AM by Gary Short (DevExpress)
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Technorati tags: Community, XPO, XAF
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Comments

 

Petros Amiridis said:

I suggest one of:

Advanced XAF Cookbook, Advanced XAF Recipies, XAF Recipies for Gurus

Petros

September 4, 2008 6:02 AM
 

Michael Proctor [DX-Squad] said:

i would like to see information on a particular issue I have, there are three classes:

Purchase

PurchasePaymentAssignment

Payment

Now when I am in a Purchase I don't wish for a person to be able to create a PurchasePaymentAssignment (as they haven't got a payment in yet). I have overriden the newobjectcontroller so that is as a "new" button for Payment instead. The issue now comes that when in the new Payment when you create a PurchasePaymentAssignment and assign the payment to that purchase it doesn't appear in the open Purchase.

How do you handle this situation?

So in summary my suggestion is a XAF Wisdom Article on taking control of new detailview creation and handling events from that to say refresh a ListView or parent DetailView.

Just a suggestion.

September 4, 2008 6:09 AM
 

danim said:

Agreed, but SOMEONE has to write advanced stuff. Event the videos are for rookies (quite funny -lots of jokes- but very basic)

The community really needs advanced tricks and black belt techniques. The projects are usually more complex than the "done before lunch" demo.

Maybe you'll need a place to get suggestions about new topics.

Some quick ideas:

Best practices in performance, security, advanced web customization, integration with (for example) Google maps, external webservices.

Topics on hosting XAF applications in hosters (godaddy, etc) in a medium trust environment. Implication on the database updates.

I'd love to have some documentation on scalability, how to deal with millions of records. Database tuning, etc...

Complex Inheritance, best practices on reusable modules, implement business valuators.

Good Patterns on how to display popups (every developer has to figure it out), print reports. Discussions about grids on client side or server side.

And very important: good stuff about localization: currencies, dates and times, encodings....

Look at common business needs and provide samples: which is the best way to implement a kind of state machine for a purchase order (for example). How to deal with states? How to cast a "potential customer" to a "real customer". How to export stuff in XML.

I don't know, I'm sure that with some creativity you'll be able to bring stuff that makes the difference to the community. You can do it. We're expecting it.

September 4, 2008 7:24 AM
 

Christian Andersen said:

It should be called The XAF Gourmet cookbook.

September 4, 2008 8:44 AM
 

Tarik Souirji said:

How about a "Secrets du Chef" series

September 4, 2008 9:57 AM
 

Saif Khan said:

Even better "Xcrets du Chef" series

September 5, 2008 12:38 AM
 

Saif Khan said:

or..... XAF Secrets of DeXmen from DeXpress

September 5, 2008 12:42 AM
 

Saif Khan said:

I meant ....XAF Secrets of DXmen from DXpress...to keep it original.

September 5, 2008 12:48 AM
 

Geoff Davis said:

More topics on view controllers would be nice, finding it hard to understand for some reason.

September 5, 2008 4:22 AM
 

Norbert Kustra said:

For me would be more helpful then writing advanced stuff if you could provide an advanced XAF demo.

September 5, 2008 5:49 AM
 

Linton said:

I suggest the "cookbook" approach leaves us with a lot of disperate (disconnected) samples. Many of the XAF early adopters have suggested DevEx XAF resources and the community should focus on creating an advanced, cohesive XAF Reference Application.

More Info:

community.devexpress.com/.../233711.aspx

and

www.devexpress.com/.../S92325.aspx

Linton

September 5, 2008 1:39 PM
 

Jascha said:

Gary,

Oh no, it's that guy that keeps banging on about compelling demo applications again ;) Norbert makes a good point - how about the advanced series covers the process of developing the XAF reference application in nice bite-sized installments? Something to do with banquets, feasts or even Mr Creosote comes to mind...

FYI you may be interested to follow this thread community.devexpress.com/.../233711.aspx and suggestion www.devexpress.com/.../S92325.aspx  to get a feel as to how popular (or not) this is amongst us rank-and-file customers ;)

Cheers,

Jascha

September 5, 2008 1:54 PM
 

Sebastia Prat i Pons said:

I'm absolutely agree with danim.

I'd like to add some other points:

- Advanced search forms with from-to fields (for DateTime, Strings, Entities, ...), not only filter line, way of creating advanced search forms in win and web

- How to define complex custom rules

- Localization of all controls, for instance, the DateEdit (i've downloaded and installed the localizated assemblies)

- Association (1-N), (N-M) inheritances, and how to overload

- Web: Insert Ajax panel and mix with ImmediatePostData

- WizardControl integration

- Reusing functional modules

- Web: real forms with 25 fields or more and optimize the size in KB (at least takes 400KB)

- Patterns, for a performance relaibility with 100.000 rows or more

Thanks Gary,

Sebastià

September 7, 2008 6:10 PM
 

Paolo Liverani said:

I strongly agree.

September 8, 2008 11:13 AM
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