I need to provide a window on an ASP.NET MVC web page where registered users of the site can group chat live.
Can anyone recommend a component or control that can provide real-time group chat that I can embed on an ASP.NET MVC page?
I am willing to use free or commercial components, as well as a web service.
I looked into a few web 2.0 approaches, like:
Campfire - problem is, it takes you to a separate site, and I can't embed the chat window (at least that's what they said when I contacted support)
Meebo - requires that users have Meebo accounts (I think)
What's unique here is that I need to enable site users to chat live with each other - not with a central support person (like LivePerson, or the Meebo widget).
All you really need is an action to post new messages to, an action to poll for updates, and a div to place the items.
You can accomplish all of this pretty easily with ajax and those two actions on a ChatController in ASP.NET MVC.
+1 for Campfire though, it's a really well polished tool.
There's an unofficial developer API for Campfire called Tinder.
I saw that that 37 Signals was promoting it on their website here, so it's probably pretty good.
Related
We have an idea to use ADX with MVC 5 and CRM 2013.
Is it possible?
We are doing background research on this whether to use ADX or not.
We have used ASP.NET with ADX previously.
This will help take a decision and will save our time.
Appreciate help if anyone know about this.
Adx portal - http://www.adxstudio.com/products/adxstudio-portals/
ADX offers a great product with an impressive feature list. http://www.adxstudio.com/products/adxstudio-portals/portals-features/
Like any add-on, look to see if there is something it contains that you deem as being vital and valuable enough to justify. Additionally, does your team have the ability/time to create the end product with or without ADX?
This is an opinion based question and in my opinion, none of the features alone justify the price. Especially seeing that ASP.NET + NuGet pretty much covers most of these features already.
Adxstudio Portals delivers managed forms by rendering a form in an Adxstudio Portal based on a particular form or view customization defined on an entity in CRM. Within CRM, entities can be customized and forms and views can be modified or created depending on your requirements.
https://community.adxstudio.com/products/adxstudio-portals/users-guide/managed-forms/
and
https://community.adxstudio.com/products/adxstudio-portals/developers-guide/web-controls/crmentityformview/
Above is the main reason us to consider ADX Studio.
ADX Studio, offers a good tool set to the client that has an internal developing team that will pick it up after you finish to customize it. Basically you provide some page template and the user is able to mess around with the forms to have a tailored experience (this works well when you don't have any logic on the page, just set the page and you are ready to go). Anything that is not in this category is custom made, means that you need to code it, and you will lose all the additional ADX benefits (for what concerns the read/write to CRM). Consider that a CRM developer is not a full asp/mvc developer, so anything that is more complex than change some code behind in a page template will create you problems, also all the jscript on the adx pages needs to be tailored, and you will need developers that are knowing the current web development standards, from Bootstrap to a decent js framework. Personally I'm not a huge fan, but the built-in authentication and some other features are making it a viable product. Consider that to customize it you will need someone that knows responsive design and js.
My company wants to use SalesForce as its backend for a new Web application that we are building. We will host the Web application with an ISP on our own servers. The integration points mainly involve sending customer and transaction data via the API. In essence, the Web application will have its own database, but will send over customer and transaction data to saleforce at key points.
The plan is to use SalesForce as a backend, so that we can save some time in developing all of this. What I don't understand though, is how custom functionality is handled by SalesForce?
Let's assume that our application offers some functionality. How would we expose that functionality in the SalesForce application? Initially I had imagined we could reference this function/page (in our app) via an iframe from the salesforce app — but this does not seem to be possible... are there any other options?
So, to summarise, I need to show parts (or pages) of our web app in the SalesForce UI. If I can achieve this, it would mean that the customer services team can do everything in one interface (handle tickets, update user data etc.).
I am at my wit's end with this, it's even causing some sleepless nights. I would appreciate any useful advice!
If you create a visualforce page using a standard controller, you will be able to embed that visualforce page on page layouts of that object type. You can then iframe your web app into that visualforce page.
I.e. if you create the following visualforce page, you can drag it onto your case layout:
<apex:page standardController="Case">
<iframe src="http://your-web-app-url" style="width: 100%; height: 100%;" />
</apex:page>
You will need seperate but similar visualforce pages if you need your app on other objects than case.
Alternatively, you could expose your data to Salesforce via some API (xml or Json) and then build your application natively in Salesforce with apex and vf. This presents a different set of challenges, but the user experience is better in my opinion.
Consider using Force.com Canvas, now GA, which is an added-value iframe with more security and easier integration with Salesforce APIs than raw iframes - see https://stackoverflow.com/a/17484855/992887
Iframes should be possible - If you are using standard layouts, try creating Visualforce components containing iframes - like the example above.
If it is a simple application/part, I would recommend developing the application on Force.com itself - We have build some very complex enterprise level apps on Force.com - although I would add that Apex/Visualforce is an immature language for building complex apps and many times you will be dealing with its limitations. But once you make it, it works like a charm.
Its time to rebuild my portfolio site, and I am thinking of either using Silverlight (still have to learn the basics but would be fun) or use MVC.NET.
I would like to use Silverlight since its something I am really interested in learning, and building up a small portfolio site should not be an out of this world task. However I do not know if its advisable, since I want my portfolio to be viewed and accessed by everyone, platform independent.
What do you guys think?
Thanks
From an SEO and ease of page bookmarking point of view you might want to go with traditional HTML, i.e. ASP.NET MVC.
The downside of building an entire site in Flash or Silverlight is that users can't bookmark a specific page within it, and search engine bots can't by default follow links or parse the text.
The following page deals with SEO and Silverlight sites.
http://silverlight.net/learn/whitepapers/seo-for-silverlight/
If really want platform independence you should avoid Silverlight, users on Linux especially won't get a good experience at the moment.
However if you want reasonable access by people in general then Silverlight is do-able.
You might ask yourself whether coupling your important portfolio site with your own personal improvement plan is a good idea.
Utlimately then develop your site with ASP.NET-MVC then spend some time with Silverlight without impacting your site, or perhaps include some content via Silverlight.
You can build both of them. It will allow you to see the differences between them and compare them.
I think your portfolio site should show your works also with its structure. If you are doing design, It would be nicer to make your site with Silverlight!
Those are actually not two techonologies that are related in any way or say that you should use one over another. You can have a ASP.NET MVC site (which I prefer and suggest to you) and then use Silverlight parts in it.
I prefer using Silverlight (or Flash for the same matter) only for animations, maybe parts of a website but not for entire website. If only portfolio will be built in Silverlight you should definitely do it in classic HTML too for users that lack Silverlight support.
May be it's too late about answering.
Now, Silverlight seems to go to its end. Microsoft wants to stop supporting it after 2021.
But, since Microsoft says they will ever support OOB mode, I think you could continue to developp to Silverlight today.
So I think, it's up not for animations. It's up to users of the application :
Silverlight has some good avaibilities to simulate windows like application.
After loading data in cache, you can have better user reactivity.
And, you get an other good point : user can easily cancel data they write.
At the end, with RIA services technology, for developpers, this is pretty easy to simulate entities like in client development.
As it says before, you can have mvc web application with silverlight inside.
I'm curious to know if any basic CMS code has been written for ASP.NET MVC.
The reason I ask is, I'm making a data-driven website for a client, and I've already spent a significant amount of time building it from the ground-up in MVC, but now the client wants content management facilities.
Basically they want to be able to add/edit/remove articles and have revision control.
It would be great if I could somehow 'bolt on' the content management without having to start again from scratch, developing it under an existing CMS.
Should I build the article management and revision control myself, or should I re-use some existing package?
N2 does what you describe - "bolts on" to existing ASP.NET solutions (including MVC).
Also, kooboo is interesting http://www.kooboo.com
(I know this question is old, but it still comes high up for the relevant search terms.)
Today I discovered Meek, http://www.adventuretechgroup.com/labs-meek/, and it was very simple and unobtrusive to add to my MVC project, which I believe is what the original poster would have wanted - bolting on CMS as a feature rather than having it take over your entire site.
Piranha CMS is well suited to bolting on to an existing application. The author of it describes why and how here. To quote straight from that source:
"Our focus is content management and to have a transparent and lightweight API for developers. Piranha CMS has almost no components or helpers that render any HTML at all, it simply provides a database, a manager interface and a routing mechanism for retrieving the correct data for the current request.
In the case of you having an existing website you could actually bypass the routing completely, add one page at a time in the manager interface and then manually load the Page model in you existing page. This would allow you to keep your original application exactly the same but manage the content form the manager interface."
If you are still looking, I've published my new open source CMS here:
MVCwCMS
I'm actively working on it so I will push more updates soon.
Here is also a quick summary as to how Telerik Sitefinity does it:
http://www.sitefinity.com/mvc-cms
in brief - allows you to plug in standard system.web.mvc.controller classes as widgets, lets you use the API for anything including model binding, standard Razor for a view engine etc.
There is also Oxite which I believe is more of a blog engine.
Heve a look at AtomicCms it's a free open source content management system based on ASP.NET MVC 1.0
http://atomiccms.codeplex.com
Check for Orchard ;-)
It is based on asp.net mvc.
In our asp.net mvc based web site, we want to allow users to manage their calendar and emails.
We don't want to develop these services on our own as there are too complex and time consuming.
Are there any open source projects that we can adopt? Any other suggestions?
Calendar Here: CodeProject
As for email I am not aware of anything currently, but it's not the type of thing people will make without cause, or at least not this early on. The email management should be a lot simpler to implement than the calendar though, so I say take the time to make one, simply because you have got the cause.