Building an MVC web application. Will be a single page app highly driven by javascript (require.js, pager.js, jquery, knockout, etc).
This application would have its own built-in pages, controllers, etc - and would need to be able to accept external plug-and-play functionality as well.
Ideally, I could just drop a .dll from another MVC web app into the main app and it would inherit not only the dropped in app's controllers, but would also bring in its web files (.htm, *.ts, *.js, *.css, etc).
Imagine having a home page with tiles for each installed dll. Referencing a new dll would add the app's tile to the home page - which is an entry point into the app.
Each plug-and-play app would need to adhere to our routing design (for MVC controllers and PagerJS).
Lastly, each app would need to be able to share user login data.
I know my questions are a bit broad, but I just wanted to get some ideas and see where it takes me.
MvcContrib has introduced Portable Area that is a set of reusable multi-page functionality can be dropped into an application to provide rich functionality without having to custom build functionality that is literally the same in every application.
This could be considered a plug-in or add-in type of functionality. The portable portion of this approach is that the area can be distributed as a single assembly rather than an assembly and a host of other files, like views or other html assets that need to be managed and maintained over time.
By making a portable area totally self contained in a single assembly, this should allow for easier reuse and upgrades to the area. The challenge for doing something like this has been how do you allow enough control over the User Interface by the application yet still allow the actual views to be packaged with the logic.
The description above is a part of a popular project in CodePlex which could help you to understand/use the technology behind the concept of Plug-able MVC application.
ASP.Net MVC Portable Areas via MvcContrib is a post by Eric Hexter that describes Portable Area in detail.
Related
As a way of raising the standards of our codebase I would like all new web projects (where possible) to use MVC5 with Inversion of Control. I'd like to have a service, domain and repository layers. Plus Unit Tests to get them started.
Obviously this is a lot of code to do up front for every project, and I want to avoid "just copy ProjectXYZ and strip out what you don't need" as this has been fraught with human errors in the past.
How do I take my very basic skeleton solution and turn it into a template for my colleagues to do File -> New Project etc ?
They could just copy the .sln I create, but it seems like there might be a more professional way to do it.
Perhaps there is already one out there we can use?
I am the developer of ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate (I found this question by checking my GitHub traffic and seeing #floatas's link, so thank you #floatas).
The default MVC project template is too basic and gives you very little out of the box. The idea behind ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate is to write all the boilerplate code for you, so you don't have to.
Now it does not contain unit tests, repositories etc. but it does include a lot of other things that every website requires.
Secure By Default
The default MVC template is not as secure as it could be. There are various settings (Mostly in the web.config file) which are insecure by default. For example, it leaks information about which version of IIS you are using and allows external scripts to access cookies by default!
ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate makes everything secure by default but goes further and uses various HTTP headers which are sent to the browser to restrict things further.
It also makes use of the new Content Security Policy (CSP) HTTP Header using the NWebSec NuGet packages. CSP revolutionizes web security and I highly recommend reading the above link.
Setting up SSL/TLS, so that your site runs over HTTPS is made easy with easy step by step instructions and links.
Fast By Default
The default MVC template does a pretty poor job in the performance department. Probably because they don't make any assumptions about which web server you are using. Most of the world and dog that are writing ASP.NET MVC sites use IIS and there are settings in the web.config file under the system.webServer section which can make a big difference when it comes to performance.
ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate makes no such assumptions. It turns on GZip compression for static and dynamic files being sent to the browsers making them smaller and quicker to download. It also uses Content Delivery Networks (CDN) by default to make common scripts like jQuery quicker to download (You can turn this off of course but the point is ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate is fast by default).
That's not all! There are a bunch of other tweaks and examples of practices which can help improve the performance of the site. ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate achieves a score of 96/100 on YSlow (Its not possible to get the full 100 as some of it's criteria contradict each other and site scripts need to be moved to a CDN which you need to do yourself).
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The default ASP.NET MVC template takes no consideration of Search Engine Optimization at all. ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate adds a dynamically generated robots.txt file to tell search engines which pages they can index. It also adds a dynamically generated sitemap.xml file where you can help search engines even further by giving them links to all your pages.
ASP.NET MVC has some very useful settings for appending trailing slashes to URL's and making all URL's lower case. Unfortunately, both of these are turned off by default, which is terrible for SEO. This project turns them on by default.
It also includes an MVC filter which helps to redirect non-canonical URL's (URL's without a trailing slash or mixed case characters which are considered different URL's by search engines) to their canonical equivalent.
Accessibility
4% of the world population is estimated to be visually impaired, while 0.55% are blind. Get more statistics here. ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate ensures that your site is accessible by adding aria attributes to your HTML mark-up and special shortcuts for people using screen readers.
Browser Compatibility
Websites need to reach as many people as possible and look good on a range of different devices. ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate supports browsers as old as IE8 (IE8 still has around 4% market share and is mostly used by corporations too lazy to port their old websites to newer browsers).
ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate also supports devices other than desktop browsers as much as possible. It has default icons and splash screens for Windows 8, Android, Apple Devices and a few other device specific settings included by default.
Resilience and Error Handling
At some point your site is probably going to throw an exception and you will need to handle and log that exception to be able to understand and fix it. ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate includes Elmah, the popular error logging addin by default. It's all preconfigured and ready to use.
ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate uses popular Content Delivery Networks (CDN) from Google and Microsoft but what happens in the unlikely event that these go down? Well, ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate provides backups for these.
Not only that but standard error pages such as 500 Internal Server Error, 404 Not Found and many others are built in to the template. ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate even includes IIS configuration to protect you from Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks.
Easier Debugging and Performance Testing Tools
ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate makes use of Glimpse (As advertised by Scott Hansleman here). It's a great tool to use as you are developing, to find performance problems and bugs. Of course, Glimpse is all preconfigured, so you don't need to lift a finger to install it.
Patterns and Practices
Doing things right does sometimes take a little extra time. Using the Inversion of Control (IOC) pattern for example should be a default. ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate uses the Autofac IOC container by default. Some people get a bit tribal when talking about IOC containers but to be honest, they all work great. Autofac was picked because it has lots of helpers for ASP.NET MVC and Microsoft even uses it for Azure Mobile Services.
ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate also makes use of the popular Less files for making life easier with CSS. For an example, it can make overriding colours and fonts in the default Bootstrap CSS a cinch.
ASP.NET MVC is a complicated beast. You can end up with lots of magic strings which can be a nightmare when renaming something. There are many ways of eliminating these magic strings but most trade maintainability for slower performance. ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate makes extensive use of constants which are a trade-off between maintainability and performance, giving you the best of both worlds.
Search
There is a lot more to implementing search in your application than it sounds. ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate includes a search feature by default but leaves it open for you to choose how you want to implement it. It also implements Open Search XML right out of the box. Read Scott Hanselman talk about this feature here.
Social
Open Graph meta tags and Twitter Card meta tags are included by default. Not only that but ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate includes fully documented HTML helpers that allow you to easily generate Open Graph object or Twitter Card met tags easily and correctly.
There is RehanSaeed/ASP.NET-MVC-Boilerplate, aspnetboilerplate.com and probably many more tools to generate starting template. They are open source and can be installed as a plugin, so you can change the way you like and give to your team.
If you still really want to create your own, you can follow these steps. I can't include them all here because they are quite long.
First of all, sorry for any english mistakes. Its my first post on Stack Overflow and english is not my native language.
Im facing a problem on a web project being currently developed here at my company. We are making a large overhaul at a legacy application.
The application is being built by different teams in a manner that one team is writing a framework/foundation application that will be consumed by all the other applications (think as modules or even standalone satellite applications). All the applications are currently being written in ASP.NET MVC 3. and the framework (and the others) have views, models, controllers and static resources as any mvc applications (like the login screen, the menus, layouts, etc).
Currently we are organizing the projects like desired using a modified version of the MVCContrib Portable Areas.
My.Framework.Web
My.Sales.Web
My.Customer.Web
The MVCContrib project seems kinda of dead right now and we are looking for other approaches to solve this particular situation.
So my question is: We are doing this the right way? i mean, there is another way to treat a situation where strong interface reuse between projects are a necessity? This seems to me like a common situation but could not find anything similar (on scale) on the internet or books.
Best regards.
You can go with something like these:
The MVCContrib way (as you mentioned)
Griffin's MVC Plugin system
Simple MVC Areas solution
I think they are all have a disadvantage that is you need to copy View and Content files if you don't want them to be in your plugin assembly. But if you want to, you can use razorgenerator that can embed views in your assembly. So you can create areas then embed all of stuff in area assembly using razorgenerator and them reference it in your host project and register that area.
BTW, I think your application architecture (that is like Composite Web Application) is good for creating several products that have similar services or modules in them.
I'm designing a Module that is to be consumed by two distinct WebSites. Everything will be written in MVC (the module and both web applications).
I would like to design my module so that the code can be included from a shared location. I only want to maintain a single version. My first thought was the Area feature of MVC 2. But from my reading it appears as though MVC 2 only "officially" supports Inline Areas.
It sounds like MultiProject support for Areas could be dropped in the near future. What are the pros and cons of Areas implemented as single projects vs multiple projects in asp.net mvc
Are there any alternatives?
A real world example of my design would be creating an MVC Shopping Cart (this would be the shared Module) and consuming it on two different MVC web sites (say a Book Store and a Bicycle Parts Store).
MVC Contrib's Portable Areas are just what you need:
http://www.lostechies.com/blogs/hex/archive/2009/11/01/asp-net-mvc-portable-areas-via-mvccontrib.aspx
My experience has been nothing but positive. Have 3 apps sharing 3 portable areas. One is going into production pretty soon.
You can still make it an Area, maintain it in one place and copy it to other projects when needed. There's no way I know to make it work out of the box without setting up the appropriate routes in the consuming web project.
Other than that, I would be interested in a solution too.
Introduction:
Now I know this question could be very broad and it would be too hard to answer without me asking something specific. So All I ask is just some direction, or a brief high level explanation of a design, or maybe there is already some framework out there that could help me get started...I'm not sure.. I have never designed a plugin architecture before, so maybe there is some resource/example you could point me to on the web that would help me learn so that I may come up with my own solution.
Details of my question:
My intention is I would like to create a plug-in architecture for a new pet-project that I am building in ASP.NET MVC.
I would like to design it so that it has some sort of plug-in ability for all, or at least most, of the application's components.
The reason I would like to do this, is so that I may be able to do deployments with nearly zero down time. The idea is that when I want to deploy the latest version I would drop in the new DLLs into a specific folder, and the application would load up the new plug ins and that is it.
For exapmle, lets say I add a new "contacts" feature to my web application where users can search, add and delete contacts. I would like to be able to deploy that by way of plugins.
Is something like this even possible for Web Applications? Or am I just dreaming?
It's definitely possible.
You will need to define a pretty comprehensive interface that represents everything your plugins will have to do. You should approach it by differentiating what is "core" to your application, and where the extensibility points are. For example, where will the plugins be accessed? Will they be tabs on a page, or links in a sidebar? What properties does each plugin need to have in order to fit into the plugin container?
Generally, plugins are enumerated via reflection by looking for assemblies that implement the plugin interface.
Just for encouragement, we've done this with an enterprise product that provides a generic framework for "management" interfaces for web sites. Developers just need to drop in a plugin dll that builds specific property pages, and they show up in the management interface menu, all the navigation is taken care of, and their dll's just have to worry about their own domain logic.
There is always the dll-way where you define some interfaces that plugins follow.
But for web application, especially ASP.NET MVC, you need a controller, views and so. Probably these can be included in a dll file using prepared controller factory to handle that, but it would be hard to develop these plugins.
Some inspiration for code (or db) embedded content: Haacked about that
ASP.NET MVC version 2 will support areas, where you can put some parts of the application into different folders within the app. This way you can just upload some files and the app will recognize these new files. Read more there Haacked blog
PS: I found another person here on S.O. asking the same question as me:
Plug-in architecture for ASP.NET MVC It might be useful for someone researching the same topic.
Is there any reason that MVC isn't equally useful for desktop apps as for web apps?
What would be required to make an ASP.NET MVC directory tree implementable as a desktop app?
Prism
I've always thought of the term MVC as the same as a n-layer application - so correct me if I'm wrong here folks.
When i develope, I always(unless other instructed) use the following model/structure, also in applications:
GUI(Web, Winform, whatever) ->
Business logic ->
Data layer ->
And also with an underlying "Model"
... Which is a sort of MVC - So yes, it is usefull for desktop apps also. The main advantage with this, is that you can develope web, win and mobile(++) applications based on the same code.
Another thing that could be done, is to create the data/businesslayers as web-services...
I think this aproach would qualify as SOA.
EDIT:
As a note, the four levels of applications are created as seperate projects - and then used as adding reference to either the project, or the DLL, or from the GAC(or wherever you like.....) :) Thus, the need for a directory structure is not needed.
Hmmm... well, your view can be rendered as anything... HTML, XML, etc. So, why not XAML? I wonder if you can get your WPF or Silverlight app to work in the MVC framework this way... that is, not requiring a web server to run.
There is nothing stopping you from using the MVC pattern in a desktop app. In fact, it has been used on the desktop since before there was a web.
See Wikipedia for some examples
MVC just stands for "Model View Controller" which describes the way that concerns are separated from each other using the MVC pattern.
As far as using ASP.NET MVC on the desktop, there are a few problems. For one thing, it relies on HTTP requests and responses. You would need a server layer as part of your application architecture to listen for requests and send responses. Second, ASP.NET MVC views are really just simple HTML text files meant to be interpreted by a web browswer. So, you would need an HTML rendering component as a GUI front-end. You would likely want a CSS rendering engine and a JavaScript interpreter as well.
Basically, all you would be doing is running a dedicated browser as the front-end and a local web server as the back end.
There is really not much need since there are many great MVC frameworks already. There are also closely related patterns like MVP (Model View Presenter) and MVVM (Model-View-View Model). For example, many WPF (Windows Presentation Framework) apps are MVVM.