Monday, March 31, 2014

Data Display

Since the last update, I have been focusing heavily on line-of-business functionality.  I recently rebuilt the management of containers for ListBox to better handle a large amount of data.  This also led to better testing of the ListBox.  Ever since, I have focused on creating a concept similar to DataGrid; however, with better fundamentals in mind.  The GridItemsControl will be responsible for displaying data in tabular format.  The concept of headers, filters, paging, and selection will be abstracted into separate elements that will be easily to hook up.

Friday, January 31, 2014

Dependency Resolution

It's been too long since my last update.  Since I am not very disciplined with this blog, I have decided to open up public viewing access to the 2 trello boards we use to manage the project.  They are listed on our home page: http://fayde.wsick.com/.

Recently, I have been working hard on trying to create a simple developer experience for Fayde.  The biggest issue revolved around dependency resolution.  There is some level of extensibility to be able to create your classes and controls that can be used within XAML.  Silverlight and WPF both used xml namespaces to manage and Fayde does the same with a caveat.  When we start building tutorials, we will explain exactly how to use.  I am very happy with the following iteration of Fayde that is available on nuget.  There is a simple, yet very powerful way to include third-party and internal libraries along with web project modules.

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Xaml Loader (continued)

I am wrapping up work to entirely remove the server piece from Fayde.  Before, Fayde would parse the xaml and deliver json.  That is no longer necessary.  This should make setup easier and remove the requirement to run in IIS.  This engine will also allow users to support custom routing mechanisms.  In addition, an extensive amount of unit tests have been added to the XamlLoader in javascript.

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Xaml Loader

Until now, we have been processing XAML on the server and delivering JSON to the client.  When we first did this, we knew it would be a quick and dirty implementation to test out the engine.  I have spent the last week building a Xaml Loader on the client.  In addition to removing much of the server pieces, I have been creating many unit tests to stabilize this new work.  Hopefully the next update will deliver news of speed improvements.

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Binding Fixes

I recently found a small bug (code-wise) that caused a massive bug (performance-wise) on bindings.  As part of my rebuild, I failed to account for inherited data contexts properly.  This led to a near-infinite loop of setting the inherited data contexts back on itself when using 2-way bindings.  I have patched this issue.  I also went a step further and reduced the overhead of inherited data contexts.  I have added unit tests to ensure this type of thing doesn't appear in the future.

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Theming

It has been very difficult to change out the theme for an app.  Today, I added the ability to specify Theme="" in the default.fap xaml.  I have included 2 themes in the Fayde package: Default and Metro.  You currently cannot swap out themes at runtime.  That will come in good time.

Saturday, August 3, 2013

Real world tests

Lately, I have been working on creating real world tests to help find pain points in the software.  I have been creating a timeline utility to help profile what the engine is doing over the course of loading the application, navigating to a page, and rendering everything.  I have also been slowly checking in fixes and updating the nuget package.