Announcing Masonry for node.js

I’m happy to announce that node.js version of ‘Masonry’ framework (branded as collab.js) has landed it’s GitHub repository.

Masonry is a starter kit for social-enabled web applications. To get more details about Masonry starter kit for ASP.NET MVC4 please refer to the following article.

Supported environments

Masonry.js supports both OSX and Windows development environments. In addition it contains support for Microsoft WebMatrix 2 for development and deployment/publishing, and uses only those NPM modules that do not require manual compilation steps in order to run on either OSX x64 or Windows 7 x64 systems.

Supported databases

Masonry.js features extensible provider-based model for data layer. It is extremely easy writing custom data providers or switching between them. At the moment of writing this article the following database engines are supported out-of-box:

• Microsoft SQL Server
• MySQL Server

Providers for Azure SQL, MongoDb and SQLite are in progress and will appear pretty soon.

Simple code maintenance

The Node.js version of Masonry provides a better code partitioning with the benefit of keeping the core implementation and modules up-to-date with less effort. Masonry views, routes and controllers are kept separately to avoid interference with your development process.

Great level of extensibility

With node.js and JavaScript you get extensibility for nearly everything out of box. With node.js you don’t need binary compilation of the project and so don’t need complex plugin layers with always limited APIs for discovery and initialization of extensions at run time.

In order to reduce the need modifying core Masonry files there is a set of lightweight contracts (via configuration files) to modify or extend key parts of the UI like brand/copyright information, sidebar/header links, etc. That means less time can be spent to keep Masonry up-to-date and more time for your own features.

Separate presentation and web api layers

The frontend is separated with a plain presentation layer and web api’s - set of RESTful services with JSON output by default. It becomes extremely easy switching between presentation layers and rendering engines, or building  completely different clients on the top of existing RESTful endpoints.

And many more…

You should expect more features and details soon. Meanwhile feel free raising issues and/or suggestions here.

 

Simple Workflow Designer with Silverlight and MEF

Introducing simple workflow designer

I’m excited to announce another project from my collection went public today. This time it is a demo POC (proof of concept) implementation for a simple workflow designer written in Silverlight 4 and MEF.

The project contains the following features that may be interesting for review:

• Design surface with drag and drop (MVC)
• Toolbox with automatic runtime discovery of items (MVVM)
• Drawing connections, live update of connections during drag and drop
• Separate model layer with custom serialization support (functions, activities, workflows)
• Separate presentation layer (visual elements for activities), styling and templating nodes
• Runtime discovery of models and corresponding node views (decoupled layers)
• Simple rules (i.e. “Output ” node may have only 1 incoming connection)

There are two modes supported out of box – Design and Source views.

Design view

This mode showcases the process of visual modeling. The process is divided into two separated areas – Toolbox and Design Surface.

Toolbox hosts all items exported and discovered at runtime by means of MEF. Default set of activities resides in a separate “WorkflowDesigner.Activities.dll” assembly and can be easily replaced or extended. There’s also an additional “WorkflowDesigner.Sdk.dll” assembly that is mean to be shared across 3rd party libraries and aids in creating custom activity libraries.

You can add activities to the surface by double-clicking the corresponding item in the toolbox. For the sake of simplicity there is no drag and drop support for the toolbox but it can be easily introduced. The quickest way may be reusing Telerik’s drag and drop manager with fancy visual cues, but this is out of scope of this article.

Design surface is based on MVC pattern and showcases basic set of functions like: drag and drop of activities across the surface, drawing connection lines, removing nodes or connections, clearing entire surface. Every visual node is mapped to underlying model (activity) at runtime. That means that both activity and it’s visual representation are completely decoupled and any of the parts can be easily tuned or extended.

For demonstration purposes default activities emulate the behavior of OData- or SQL-based entities with simple UI editors, entire project emulates the process of creating a workflow that deals with data aggregation.

UI dialogs are not bound to any particular business logic except assigning corresponding property values of the model entity. However this may be a good start building user experiences based on your real-life scenarios.

Source view

In addition the Source view feature is supported. It allows you switching to the XML representation of the workflow at any time during design process. Serialization is completely custom and was kept as simple as possible in order to be replaceable or customized. Based on your real-life scenarios the resulting XML can travel to server side and can be turned into object graph without UI dependencies, etc.

Project structure

I will be giving only brief overview of the project structure in this article. Most of the code is split into 2 areas and resides in 2 different class libraries: “WorkflowDesigner.Sdk” and “WorkflowDesigner.Activities“:

As soon as you figure out the process of creation of new activities you most probably may need only “WorkflowDesigner.Sdk” assembly that contains all core and shared functionality.

Source code

You can grab the source code at my GitHub repository.

 

Masonry Extensibility. Part 1.

This is a second post in a series of articles about Masonry starter kit. Please refer to this article in order to get more information about Masonry:

Announcing Masonry public preview

Masonry starter kit was designed with extensibility in mind from the very beginning. There are several out-of-box blocks that greatly reduce learning curve and efforts required to extend main navigation elements like sidebar and header bar, provide custom content and routing, integrate into help or search system or messaging pipeline.

Masonry is also shipped with a project template for Visual Studio 2012 that turns the process of extension library creation into a several mouse-click procedure.

Part 1 of this article will give a high-level overview of supported extensibility features as well as developer tools shipped with version 1.0

Part 2 will dwell on technical details of extension discovery, processing and mapping of dynamic/static content and UI composition.

Extensions in Masonry are based on Areas that are compiled into a single-assembly libraries and deployed to Masonry-based web application by means of xcopy. For more details on Areas in ASP.NET MVC please refer to the following articles:

Walkthrough: Organizing an ASP.NET MVC Application using Areas

ASP.NET MVC Areas – A Better Way to Structure The Application

Using Areas in ASP.NET MVC Application

Every Masonry extension depends on the following assemblies:

• Masonry.Core.dll (required); contains low-level infrastructure required by Masonry and 3rd party extensions in order to function.
• Masonry.Extensibility.dll (required); contains shared blocks that may be used by all or any 3rd party extension. For the moment of writing this article it consists mainly of UI-relacted contracts.
• Masonry.Resources.dll (optional); contains default localized content that may be reused within extensions

Masonry does not require extra efforts in order to enable extensibility support for a web application, referencing “Masonry.Core” is usually enough to automatically enable underlying infrastructure.

There are two different modes supported by Masonry out-of-box: automatic (or convention-based) and controlled (or configuration-based) extension discovery.

Automatic extension discovery

This is the default mode and requires zero coding efforts besides referencing “Masonry.Core” assembly from within your Masonry-based web application.

Prior to web application startup the following workflow is executed automatically:

• Underlying extensibility engine is initialized and started
• All assemblies are discovered by “*.Extension.dll” mask and loaded
• Custom ASP.NET MVC view and content providers (Masonry-specific) are initialized and wired with the extension libraries if loaded with previous step

With automatic discovery mode every 3rd party extension library must follow the following predefined conventions in order to allow resulting assembly to be discovered and loaded:

• Extension assembly file name should end with “.Extension.dll“
• Default root namespace for the extension assembly should not end with “Extension” word

The process of configuring assembly file name and namespace for a new extension project is pretty simple. For example in order to configure a “Dummy” extension developer may need performing the following steps:

• Create a .NET class library project named “Dummy” and navigate to project properties pane
• Ensure “Default namespace” property is set to “Dummy”
• Change “Assembly name” property from “Dummy” to “Dummy.Extension”

Note: steps above can be omitted when using “Masonry Extension” project template for Visual Studio 2012 shipped with Masonry kit out-of-box. More details regarding project template will be given further in this article.

Controlled extension discovery

Due to security, performance, additional level of extension management and review, or any other reasons it is possible switching off automatic discovery for 3rd party extensions and defining them explicitly within configuration file (web.config) instead.

The following picture demonstrates registration of “Dummy” widget within configuration file:

In this case the following workflow will be executed prior to web application startup:

• Underlying extensibility engine is initialized and started
• All assemblies from configuration file are discovered and loaded
• Custom ASP.NET MVC view and content providers (Masonry-specific) are initialized and wired with the extension libraries loaded during previous step

The are no file and namespace naming conventions for configuration-based mode (as it is possible defining corresponding values within configuration file as well).

Extension project template

In order to greatly simplify development process and reduce amount of efforts and time needed to create and configure a new extension library Masonry is shipped with a special project template for Visual Studio 2012.

Important note: for version 1.0 the resulting project should reside within “Extensions” subfolder of the project like displayed on the picture. This is required in order to automate configuration of assembly references and Nuget packages for a newly created project.

Project template handles and automates development process by executing the following operations:

• Creates new class library within “Extensions” subfolder
• Configures all Masonry-related assembly references, wires project with required and/or optional Nuget packages
• Enables Razor support for newly created project (code highlighting, intellisense, compilation, etc.)
• Creates initial file structure that conforms to common ASP.NET MVC Areas design
• Generates “Area Registration” settings for the given project including default route registration
• Generates set of files that address basic extensibility scenarios, for example sidebar and header bar extensions, grouping, default “main content” and “about” pages, etc.
• All generated files and automated settings take into account name of project

So upon creating a new project with this template you get a working Masonry Extension library that is ready to be instantly compiled and deployed to main web application.

By default Masonry also provides and embedded demo extension called “Dummy” that reuses most of the extensibility features:

The file structure of the project when using Masonry Extension project template will be nearly the same except the name of the area registration class, all code namespaces and all UI labels/names will be reflecting the name of the project you have defined at the creation stage. This means that multiple extensions created from the same template won’t conflict.

Here’s for example the content of the Area Registration file that was automatically generated for the “MyExtension1″ project:

And image below provides a quick example on a sidebar extension element generated automatically and aligned with your project name and settings:

Needless to say that resulting project can be tuned in any way. Visual Studio template just takes care of the most frequent, repetitive and so time-consuming tasks.

Compiling and deploying extensions

Every class library created with “Masonry Extension” project template can be instantly compiled and deployed to a Masonry-based web application without any modifications.

As a result of successful compilation you will be getting a single assembly file with all the features and content required by extension.

Important note: all non-C# files related to ASP.NET MVC (i.e. “.cshtml” files) and static content should be marked as “embedded resources” in order to be included into resulting assembly and processed by Masonry at run time. It is possible including images, JavaScript, CSS, etc. files as embedded resources as well. Masonry will ensure those files are mapped properly during execution and behave as common MVC views or static/script files.

Besides changing build action to “Embedded Resource” developers need performing no actions. Picture below demonstrates the default set of files delivered by Masonry Extension project template as embedded resources:

Deploying compiled extensions has no special requirements or prerequisites. Resulting “.dll” file can be copied into the binaries folder of the target Masonry-based web application. Optionally you can drop debugging information (.pdb files) to enable debugging of deployed extensions and stepping through the code:

Note: when using “controlled discovery mode” you may need defining a new configuration entry upon deploying your extension to the target web application.

Upon execution and extension discovery Masonry will automatically populate sidebar, header bar and other extensible UI areas with corresponding elements. Every action (link) will point to custom extension-provided content.

This is the end of basic overview of extensibility in Masonry. In the second part I will be giving more information about areas that support extensibility in Masonry, classes and contracts that may be utilized when writing custom extensions, technical details on embedded resources and the process of mapping them at run time, and a lot more…

 

Announcing Masonry public preview

Today I’m happy to announce the public availability of my new project “Masonry”. Please note that this post is a high-level overview of the project and its major features. For the sake of simplicity technical details are omitted. Developer-oriented articles will be published separately.

Introduction

Social networks and corresponding UI/UX gains more and more attention. Even big enterprise players are looking forward to embedding social and gamification features into their products these days. Most of the projects I’ve been involved with during this year had requirements for lightweight “socialization” of common business workflows, i.e. chats, timelines and data aggregation, comment systems, following/unfollowing, user profiles, etc. Most of the project prototyping I’ve observed or was part of during the year assumed Twitter/Facebook-like user experiences besides mandatory functionality requirements.

Masonry was born as an ASP.NET MVC4 starter kit (or template) to greatly reduce learning curve, time and development efforts required to start prototyping and building social-enabled web applications, or integrating social-enabled features into existing applications. It provides most common building blocks and allows startup or research teams concentrating on main application functionality rather than building social features from scratch.

Overview

Masonry is not a static template. Many frequently required and expected features are still being researched, analyzed and included into the roadmap. You should expect frequent updates that bring new blocks in the future.

The major set of features shipped with initial beta is as follows:

• Account registration with email confirmation/validation and reCaptcha support
• Account settings and password management
• Timeline and user posts (status updates)
• Public profiles, following/unfollowing other users
• Personal feeds and “twitterization” of content (account links, hash tags, etc.)
• Comment system
• Mentions and People hubs
• Wiki-based help system with Markdown support
• Extensibility support (single-assembly modules built with ASP.NET MVC4 template and deployed with xcopy)

There’s also a supplementary content to aid development:

• Default demo database to get started instantly (SQL LocalDb)
• SQL schema scripts to setup a new database
• Visual Studio 2012 project template for creating custom extensions/modules with less efforts

Account Registration

Account management is built on to of SimpleMembership provider by MS used in most of the WebMatrix projects these days. That allows having more flexible membership scenarios (i.e. support for external OAuth authentication models, Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn integration without much efforts) and provides greatly refined SQL database schema compared to popular ASP.NET SQL Membership provider.

Registration form prevents cross-site request forgery (CSRF) out of box by utilizing ASP.NET MVC’s AntiForgeryToken helpers.

Google reCaptcha is also preconfigured by default

In addition Masonry supports account validation and email validation. This feature when opted in through configuration allows automatically generating confirmation emails with links to confirm and enable newly created account.

Signing in

Similar to Registration form the LogOn one prevents cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks by default. All redirect URL links (used to redirect back to the requested content that requires authentication) are verified to be valid local addresses rather than external links.

Timeline

All authenticated users are automatically redirected to the Timeline. Similar to Twitter it is a long stream showing all Posts from those you have chosen to follow, or your own posts with user comments. There are no paging controls on the Timeline, similar to Facebook new content is downloaded smoothly while you scroll down the page.

All content is “twitterized” by default – all user account tags are turned into user profile links and point to Personal Feeds (see below), all hash tags are wrapped with hyperlinks redirecting to internal Search controller upon click. In addition all hash tags are enumerated in a separate area below the main post content.

There are at least 2 easy ways to post new content (i.e. status update) in Masonry:

• Inline editor box at the bottom of the Timeline
• “New Post” button on the header bar and available on any page

Image below demonstrates a dialog that appears when user presses “new post” button:

Personal Feeds

Masonry provides support for personal feeds – streams showing public posts by a specific user. There are several ways quickly accessing personal feed:

• User account name within the post header
• User account tag within the post or comment content
• Public profile dialog that pops up upon clicking user avatar
• People or Mentions hub

Upon navigation the sidebar control will automatically reflect the account opened:

Public Profile Popups

Masonry automatically wraps all user avatars with profile popups that allow following/unfollowing particular user, navigating to a personal feed or People hub to see followings/followers.

Mentions

Similar to Twitter Mentions Masonry provides support for streaming posts that “mention” current user – i.e. any post that has an account tag in the content. All Timeline features like profile popups, comments, personal feed navigation are automatically applied to Mentions stream as well.

People Hub

To simplify intranet/corporate scenarios Masonry provides a special feature “People Hub” that allows newly registered users discovering already existing members (to follow, view personal feeds, etc.). People hub lists existing uses with basic public information (see Account Settings section below) and main statistics like number of posts, followers or users being followed by a particular user. It is possible following/unfollowing users directly from the People hub:

Note: it may be possible wiring People hub with additional logic and business rules, like showing/filtering users by department, etc.

Account Settings

Users can access their account and profile settings from the header bar. Besides account editing Settings drop down menu provides access to Help system, About information and allows signing out as shown on the picture below:

There are no mandatory fields within account settings section. All public fields are optional: photo, display name, location, website and bio. If current browser supports HTML5 File API user will be able to preview changes to the picture live without uploading any data to server.

Both “Account settings” and “Change password” forms provide lightweight unobtrusive alerts to indicate update results.

Comment system

For extensibility and flexibility purposes Comment system in Masonry is separated from status updates (posts). To avoid user distraction comment areas are collapsed by default:

Moreover comments are loaded asynchronously upon expanding “Comments” area. That reduces initial page memory footprint and speeds up main content loading.

The author of the post has possibility removing posts with corresponding comments:

Similar to Facebook Masonry supports displaying posts in separate pages. Every post that has more than 10 comments is automatically opened in a separate view.

Help System, Markdown Support

Help system is a separate block within Masonry that provides Wiki-like experience and powered by Markdown syntax.

Underlying Help Controller maps physical “.md” files automatically, it is possible updating Markdown content with a running application:

Extensibility and Modules

Masonry utilizes Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) and ASP.NET MVC Areas to provide rich extensibility support. External extensions are discovered and loaded automatically with zero code configuration and prerequisites within main application. All extensions are represented by a single-file assemblies containing a fully-fledged ASP.NET MVC4 pieces together with static content, styleshees and javascript files.

Upon new extension library discovery Masonry automatically augments UI with additional entities taken from the corresponding plugin:

Every custom extension can provide extra elements for header bar (with grouping support), sidebar, may provide user with additional content. With Masonry it becomes extremely easy extending standard UI and functionality.

In order to greatly simplify development process Masonry provides a special “Masonry Extension” project template that can be used with Visual Studio 2012. This project template takes care of project structure generation, enables Razor compilation and syntax highlighting for the generated class library project and contains all extensibility/routing settings automatically preconfigured.

Note: there will be a separate article that dives deep into Masonry extensibility, tooling and plugin development. 

That’s pretty it. Feel free to grab the code, play with it, request features that are important, file issues… everything is in the GitHub repository.

Thanks for following.

 

I’m back to blogging

After a long pause I’m finally back to blogging. This year was a very productive one, I’ve been involved in a series of awesome R&D projects related to Silverlight, ASP.NET MVC, Mono, etc. Lots of material to be turned into useful articles.

During this week there will be an additional announcement for the next big thing from my side – Masonry. That is a starter kit for social-enabled extensible MVC4 applications that enters public preview and going to land into my GitHub repository soon.

More information and posts are on the way.

Thanks for following me.

 

IL.View October 2011 Features.

October 2011 was a very busy month for IL.View in terms of new features  introduced.

The major features that are worth mentioning in this recap is as following:

• Automatic updates for OOB (out-of-browser) scenario
• Rich browsing for Silverlight packages (.xap files)
• Platform identifiers for assemblies
• Version numbers for assembly references
• Content preview for some file types (xml/xaml/ClientConfig/jpg/png)
• Displaying and expanding embedded resource assemblies (for Silverlight assemblies only) by pressing Space bar
• Preview of embedded resources (xml/xaml/ClientConfig/jpg/png) by pressing Space bar
• User-defined reference paths for automatic assembly resolution (similar to Visual Studio “reference paths” feature)
• Lot of stabilization and improvements for underlying infrastructures
• New assembly versioning schema based on “YYYY.MM.DD.{Build}” format

Automatic Updates

Live preview builds that are continuously  pushed to the project page got support for automatic updates. Users that are using the full-trust OOB (out-of-browser) scenario will get the application up-to-date automatically upon every launch.

Browsing Silverlight Packages

IL.View now provides rich capabilities for browsing Silverlight packages (“.xap” files). Users are now able to drag and drop “.xap” package directly onto the application surface and view package contents. Package browsing includes full support for content and assembly navigation in the same way it is done for a regular assembly.

Platform identifiers for assemblies

As application is moving forward having a single list of assemblies within the browser the platform identifiers were added to assembly names. Silverlight assemblies will be marked as “(SL)” while .NET assemblies will be marked as “.NET”. Later on identifiers will be extended to display the actual version of the corresponding framework.

Version numbers for assembly references

To improve dependency analysis process the application provides version numbers for assembly references within the reference title. That allows to avoid unnecessary decompilation or assembly resolution calls when it is only the version of reference the user is interested in.

Content Preview

It is now possible to view the content of the files that are frequently added to the “.xap” files. IL.View provides support to show xml-based files (xml, xaml, ClientConfig) with syntax colouring:

 It is also possible to preview the content of image files in the formats supported by Silverlight (.png and .jpg). Images are displayed in real sizes.

Browsing embedded resource assemblies

October version of IL.View brings out support for embedded resource assemblies navigation. This feature is however limited to only Silverlight assemblies. A new node called “Resources” will appear next to every main module of the assembly. Resource assemblies can be expanded like regular assemblies and their xml/image-based content can be previewed by pressing a Space bar on the selected item.

 Reference Paths

Application now provides a way to define common reference paths that should be used for assembly lookup during decompilation and reference resolution. There will be a new options panel called “Reference Paths” within the “Settings” page. The user is able to add or remove a path to any directory containing .NET or Silverlight assemblies that needs to be checked during decompilation process. Every single reference path can be configured to use recursive search, meaning that the entire folder tree (including all sub-folders) is going to be inspected. However recursive search is a time consuming event and users discouraged to use it against deep nested folders.

Every time an external assembly is found the path to the file is cached. This gives much better performance during next sessions.

This feature is however limited to full-trust mode running on Windows machines. “Reference Paths” section won’t be displayed when running IL.View on non-Windows computers (i.e. MacOs).

New Versioning Schema

New assembly versioning schema was applied based on “YYYY.MM.DD.{Build}” format. The version number can now be checked at the “About” page:

Besides new features there was a lot of stabilization work performed.

More and more features are being registered within the issue tracking system.

 

IL.View beta builds are now available online

Today I’m glad to announce that thanks to Github “project pages” feature I am able to host beta builds of “IL.View” that can be consumed both in browswer and out of browser.

You can browse and/or install IL.View by navigating this link: http://denisvuyka.github.com/IL.View

 

What’s new in the deployed build:

I have added an experimental support for Silverlight “.xap” packages. It will be possible to drop a “.xap” file onto IL.View surface and navigate it’s content within assembly browser like shown below:

Just have to note that the implementation of “.xap” browsing is in its early stage and is not feature complete.

What’s on the way:

Many features related to MEF framework. I’m a greatest fan of MEF and use it every day in the production. There’s some tooling that I would like to integrate into IL.View like displaying all the MEF imports/exports for the particular assembly, etc. More content viewers are pending (xaml/xml, images, etc.)

Suggestions, issues and feedbacks?

I would really appreciate to get them registered here: IL.View Issues