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Friday, January 06, 2012

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Jan 6
We haven't blogged for a quite a while, not for lack of content or news, but rather for “Stop & Think”.
Delivering new nightly builds of S-Expert 3.0 is a great, but it could be an endless loop, so when you reach a degree of satisfaction and stability you must stop and think “What’s next?”

So much as happened in the last couple of months, actually it started at the Build conference in September, when Microsoft provided details about their next operating system Windows 8. After this conference, there has been a fair amount of uncertainty about the future direction of the Microsoft development platform.
Windows 8 supports two categories of application: traditional desktop applications and the new WinRT, or Metro style applications which represent the future of smart client development. Of course all applications that run today on Windows 7 will run in the Windows 8 desktop environment.
You could find a lot of detailed information about Window 8, Windows Runtime, and Metro style applications over the internet.

Another big event at this year is HTML5 which eventually was introduced at W3C Developer Conference in November. The best quote I heard about HTML5 is “New standards for a new web”.
HTML5 has been designed to deliver almost everything you'd want to do online without requiring additional software such as browser plugins. It does everything from animation to apps, music to movies, and can also be used to build incredibly complicated applications that run in your browser.
There's more. HTML5 isn't proprietary, so you don't need to pay royalties to use it. It's also cross-platform, which means it doesn't care whether you're using a tablet, smartphone, netbook, notebook, ultrabook or Smart TV, if your browser supports HTML5, it should work flawlessly.

These new technologies reminded me with an older definition of S-Expert (I wrote it in August 2010):
“S-Expert is an integrated modeling environment contains guidance packages, code templates, professional designer, and bunch of model editors. This environment delivers the experience and best practice that helps you build efficient, scalable, and reliable business application can face the future.”
It is not a kind of new advertisement to S-Expert, but it is the right time for you to be happy because you chose the Model-driven development approach in general and S-Expert in particular. You should be happy because your application can face the future.
Let’s examine in details how can your applications that were generated by S-Expert face the future?

1. Abstraction:
This new era (WinRT & HTML5) lead us to the fact "The Change would be inevitable", which Modelingsoft built upon. Each new day proves that sticking with a specific technology is awful (especially with Microsoft technologies  ). S-Expert always fights on the opposite direction by abstracting your application components from the implementation technologies, which means that you can substitute any of the underlying frameworks in any of the development life cycle phases with little efforts. With S-Expert your models outlive technologies (so you still have something when your first language or platform becomes obsolete that you can use for your next generation solution).

For example: If you are working on WPF, Silverlight, or even WP7 application with S-Expert, then using the “Metro Mold” (It is not related to “Metro Man”, it is the upcoming Mold for building Metro style apps) by one click on the blue triangle button (Generate), you could generate a full Metro style application that can run under Windows Runtime. Your project, views, controls, and page flow are generated automatically and reflect the same architecture of your legacy application. Even your custom code will be ported in less effort, where we already take care of the underlying details (Actually if you try to get an overview into your custom code in the client side you will find that most of it is a logic code rather than framework specific code).

2. Structure of the generated applications:
    2.1 Multitier architecture
    S-Expert helps to enforce hard standards of layered architecture and consistency. The generated code is designed to be flexible, reusable, and scalable. The presentation, the application processing, and the data management are logically separate processes. By breaking up an application into tiers, developers only have to modify or add a specific layer, rather than have to rewrite the entire application over. With this solid architecture you can build Metro style or HTML5 apps that directly consume your generated service layer.
    2.2 MVVM
    Applications should avoid all “code-behind” the XAML controls, and should use the MVVM (model-view-view model) design pattern to cleanly separate all code from the XAML. S-Expert approves the MVVM as the only relation between your C# code and XAML code.  This pattern will help you porting most of your View Models to Metro style apps.
    2.3 MEF
    In S-Expert, we always take care of choosing the right technologies and frameworks. MEF is one of these frameworks that empower the generated applications. We are happy because Windows Runtime supports MEF and most of the code that uses MEF will work natively in the Metro style apps.

3. Support
You should be sure that we support you, and support your porting process. If you have any question, need detailed advice, or even need a custom development, you are welcome!!

We are also happy with what we have achieved and are very excited to complete our vision to effectively moving MDD right into the core of the .NET software development mainstream.

Finally, we are happy to announce that we are working on S-Expert 3.1.
S-Expert 3.1 New features:
•    New Mold called “Metro Mold” for building Metro style applications, totally integrated with S-Access & S-Service Molds.
•    ASP.NET MVC 4 with the new capabilities of HTML5 and CSS3.
•    Mobile web with ASP.NET MVC 4, HTML5, and jQuery Mobile.
•    Support Silverlight 5.
•    Support WPF 4.5.
•    Support Entity Framework 4.2.
•    Support NHibernate 3.2.
We have not a due date yet, but as our initial plan, the first beta version could be available in this spring.

In another context, here in Modelingsoft we are going to expand our business, and we are looking for a proper partner or venture capital that can believe on what we are doing, realize the potentials of such a product, and help us getting wider market. If you interested or need further information, Please contact us.