As development of 10.2 gets underway, and the wheels of engineering begin to spin faster and faster to produce the next great version of DevExpress products, it provides an opportunity for the technical writers to catch their breaths. Well it would, if it were not for their collective determination to improve the information available to our customers. So instead of kicking off their shoes and sitting back with a nice cup of tea, a couple of them have gone back and improved the information contained in our 10.1 what’s new. If you missed it first time round, or even if you didn’t and but you just wanted more information on what’s available in XAF in 10.1, now’s a good time to check it out.
Starting with the typed application model, which is significantly faster due to it’s use of lazy initialization and uses less memory due to holding references and not values, we then go on to look at the Domain Components Technology Preview.
This technology preview shows how Domain Components has been designed to dramatically simplify data reusability by providing a much more abstract approach to object design. To use Domain Components you define interfaces instead of regular business classes, where you specify the required properties and data fields, you also define special classes that describe how interface members behave when the object is constructed and properties are changed etc. The actual business classes are generated by XAF at runtime.
This model is much more flexible as domain logic and interfaces can be packaged together into an assembly and used as a domain library and, of course, since a class can implement any number of interfaces, but can only be derived from one base class, then this model let’s you combine domain logic in a more flexible manner.
Of course, it wasn’t only the code “under the hood” that received attention in 10.1, oh no, the UI got a more than a “lick of paint” too. Take the Ribbon UI for example, prior to 10.1 this was supported via a special module that required to to be configured manually. With the release of 10.1, the Ribbon is now automatically supported in all Windows Forms XAF applications. Enabling and disabling of the Ribbon is managed via a single Application Model property now.
Another UI capability that was improved in 10.1 was MDI with the creation of a new View strategy which enables MDI functionality with a single line of code, or via an option in the Model Editor, if you prefer.
But what about Web Forms I hear you cry? You were crying that, right? Well, if you were, don’t worry as we took good care of you there too. Firstly there was a new visual theme, in fact XAF’s core components were refactored so that the standard DevExpress ASP.Net visual themes could be used in XAF web form apps. 10.1 saw the release of the Aqua Theme, which became the default for all new applications, with the other themes to be available from 10.2 onwards.
Next we got rid of that annoying way the navigation items were duplicated at the bottom of the page, you know, using all the expensive real estate. Well not anymore, now we have a new navigation item container that allows you to show only the items you require!
We finished up by telling you about enhancements we’d made to the EasyTest Script Recorder and letting you know about a preview of the Conditional Appearance Module. So if you want to refresh your memory, or you just want to check out the new information, then now is a great time to review the 10.1 what’s new page.
That’s all for now, ‘til next time, happy XAFing! :-)