Third Party Controls and RIA Services support

schmosef
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Mar 01, 2016 1:34 pm

Third Party Controls and RIA Services support

Postby schmosef » Tue Mar 01, 2016 1:43 pm

I think this is a great project and I'm considering buying the Pro version, just to show support.

I have two questions about your plans:

1) Will this project eventually support third party UI controls like Telerik controls?
2) Will this project eventually support calling web services (and databinding), specifically, WCF RIA Services?

JS-Support @Userware
Site Admin
Posts: 1142
Joined: Tue Apr 08, 2014 3:42 pm

Re: Third Party Controls and RIA Services support

Postby JS-Support @Userware » Thu Mar 03, 2016 10:36 am

Hi

Thanks a lot for your message.

1) yes, support will come in the form of an open source project that is going to wrap the 3rd party JavaScript-based libraries into a thin C#/XAML-based wrapper to allow to consume them in C#/XAML in a CSHTML5 project.

You can see this concept in action by looking at the wrapper around the JavaScript-based ArcGIS mapping control at the following URL :

http://forums.cshtml5.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=272

2) WCF calls are already supported. Please read the following document for important information about WCF:

http://cshtml5.com/links/wcf-limitation ... rials.aspx

As far as RIA Services are concerned, the main purpose would be to ease the migration of SL apps, because RIA Services is no longer maintained by Microsoft as far as I know. Support is on our roadmap but for much later, as we first need to have all the other main features working. Companies can also fund our development of RIA Services support by contacting us, to ensure that its support is released in the short term.

In the meantime, what many companies are doing to migrate their RIAServices-based Silverlight applications to CSHTML5 is to create a new standard WCF service that "forwards" the calls to the RIAServices project. Just make sure to wrap every call so that when the client creates a reference to the new Web Service, no EntityFramework-related classes are concerned. (otherwise on the client you will get an error in "Reference.cs" about missing attributes and EntityFramework-related stuff).

Regards
JS-Support

schmosef
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Mar 01, 2016 1:34 pm

Re: Third Party Controls and RIA Services support

Postby schmosef » Mon Mar 14, 2016 7:35 pm

Thanks for your answers.

I'd like like a little clarification on your first answer about third party UI controls.

You mention building support for third party JS libraries but what I was really wondering about was support for third party Silverlight controls, like these.

Would we eventually be able to use controls like these? At the end of the day, they are just complex XAML and C#.

Also, it's not clear from your answer to by second question if model or data binding is currently, or will eventually be supported. It doesn't have to support binding to Entities. But POCO binding would be great.

Thanks again for your time.

JS-Support @Userware
Site Admin
Posts: 1142
Joined: Tue Apr 08, 2014 3:42 pm

Re: Third Party Controls and RIA Services support

Postby JS-Support @Userware » Tue Mar 15, 2016 10:38 am

Hi,

As far as the Telerik controls are concerned, I see 2 possibilities for the future:

1) Either Telerik compiles its proprietary C#/XAML source code with CSHTML5 (with or without using JS in the internal implementation for their controls)

2) Or the community creates a library of controls that provides an equivalent set of features and that mimics the API of the Telerik controls so that you can use them without changing your existing application code. By "mimics the API" I mean that the class names, namespaces, and method signatures are the same. The internal implementation will be completely different for Telerik copyright reasons. To implement those controls, the fastest approach is to use existing JavaScript libraries that provide similar functionality, and to "wrap" them inside C#/XAML classes that can be consumed by C#/XAML applications with CSHTML5, and that mimic the Telerik API. Examples of such "wrappers" can be found on the Extensions forums section, and full documentation for creating new extensions is coming soon.


As far as the second point is concerned, yes, client-side data binding (identical to that of Silverlight) is already supported and works very great. There is currently no support for EntityFramework. You can see some examples (with source code) of client-side data binding by looking at the "Binding" section of the "Showcase" sample application:
http://cshtml5.com/samples/showcase/index.html?20160127


Regards,
JS-Support

schmosef
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Mar 01, 2016 1:34 pm

Re: Third Party Controls and RIA Services support

Postby schmosef » Tue Mar 15, 2016 10:45 am

Thank you very much for the clarification.

I think what you are doing is very exciting and I plan to support you.

JS-Support @Userware
Site Admin
Posts: 1142
Joined: Tue Apr 08, 2014 3:42 pm

Re: Third Party Controls and RIA Services support

Postby JS-Support @Userware » Wed Mar 16, 2016 10:31 am

Thanks a lot schmosef.


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