I'm about to dive in to the mobile development. I have no experience in developing mobile apps. So I wanted to ask for advice/suggestion/recommendation for those who have experience in it.
I am used to Visual Basic, is there a development platform I can use that is similar to that? I mean that have the drag & drop like I can drag and drop fields, labels and then do the coding.
Do you have an idea if you want Native / Web / Hybrid?
Here is an infographic to help you on your decision: how-to-chose-the-best-mobile-architecture-infograph.html
Regarding drag&drop tools, well - I'm biased, but you should try this RAD platform (rapid application delivery) called OutSystems.
There is cloud edition that you can try for free and see the power of "dragging circles".
Check a demo of the platform here.
cheers,
V
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My org is currently in Winforms and we are renegineering our complete system which has following parts
- It is a heavy businesslogic desktop application
- Should support part on web/multiple devices (handheld)
- Part of it to be exposed as enterprise solution.
To define the target system, platform and language for such a system (timeline are to create by mid of 2016)
1. Can I replace heavy Desktop application with MS Application?
2. Should I create such DS Application with .net 4.0 WPF? (I am currently on Winforms so to me moving from Winforms to WPF or HTML5 is same)
3. I would prefer to move to HTML5 for the reason that my web, devices and desktop applocations are taken care - but do not have a path for DSA + HTML5 with WinRT
Please advice. Any other solution/suggestion also is welcome.
It really depends on what direction your company wants to go.
If you want to go down the desktop only route, then yes, WPF should suit your requirements. I would suggest using the MVVM Design Pattern, with the Repository/Unit Of Work Pattern.
If you want to go towards the Desktop/Tablet/Mobile route, then you have the option of developing an Windows App, or a Website Application.
For a Windows App, you're looking at developing Microsoft Store Apps (I'd suggest a Universal App). If you want to do this, you might as well wait for Windows 10 to be released, as universal apps have grown up since 8.1.
That leaves Web Applications. There are a myriad of options to choose from here, most common of those would probably be ASP.NET, and things like AngularJS. Please note that I'm not saying that these technologies are the best, but they are just a couple of options. It's really up to you to research the frameworks and libraries that suit your requirements.
But like I said, it really depends on what your company wants their application to do, and what devices will be compatible.
I have to develop a mobile application that is available on Android and iOS.
I do not have any experience with native development for Android or iOS, so I decided to go with some of the existing platforms like PhoneGap, Titanium or Icenium (these platforms provide me with all necessary requirements).
I saw that Icenium requires an invitation code to go through the documentation.
What I want to ask: Has someone played with Icenium? Any recommendations about this cloud-based platform? What about performance?
I have been working with Icenium and I can say that it is fun so far. It is really just an IDE that allows you to use Cordova (PhoneGap) to build apps. There are two IDEs -- one that is browser based and one that is a Windows desktop app. The native desktop app is more featured and has a better User Experience. There is some poetic justice there, if you are looking for it :)
So far, it is certainly young. Support for things like PhoneGap plugins is non-existent so far. I also can't seem to get the app working on a real device, but these are beta bugs and I expect them to be smoothed out.
Although the cloud-based approach is nice because I don't have to worry about using multiple IDEs, you lose a lot of freedom for how you want to develop. For instance, I like using CoffeeScript and there is no support for building, compiling, creating new CS files, etc. Possibly in the future?
Since it is really just an IDE for developing Cordova (PhoneGap) apps, it isn't a different platform from Cordova. It just makes development a bit more streamlined.
I have to say that from my personal experience , Icenium is slow. They market it as being html5 apps that work like native apps and this is just not the case. You can make it look like a native app and you can develop it with the native ideology as it were, letting the user experience it as if it were native, but its so slow.
Its also really odd how a microsoft technology based company ( that is telerik ) has basically removed itself from the microsoft stack with icenium. I am not saying that is bad , microsoft itself needs to do more to attract developers to its platform. Its just really odd because most of the telerik clients use the mircosoft stack , including , very importantly visual studio. Everyone knows VS they have custom plugins that suit their development style and now we must learn and use a new IDE that is so far , in my opinion not even close to the standards of anything. The one primary advantage is that you can deploy to a device.
Adding Phonegap or any other mobile based framework can be done in anything. It also does not provide support for microsoft devices at all. Which removes completely the whole cross platform environment that it seems this was supposed to be created for.
If you are not developing for microsoft , i guess its fine , but i dont see any other advantage other then it can deploy to the device for testing. If you have clients that work on the MS stack .. i would not recommend this at all. Just fire up VS and develop as you have before and just include those libraries in your file system.
Is there anyway to insert the MS Pubcenter Ads into a WPF 4.0 C# application. If so, please show me step by step how.
The pubcenter does not support ads within anything other than WP7 or Win8 apps. Hopefully this will change to include standard desktop apps as we have a moderately successful game on WP7 that I would like to integrate ad support for and release on the desktop, but for now we'll need to look elsewhere for desktop ad revenue. I haven't found a solution yet either, unfortunately, so if anyone has a suggestion I'd like to hear it too.
I'm evaluating Silverlight for a RIA right now. A large amount of the Gui is to be designed by people without programming skills. Visually the application should be very appealing, animations, smooth transitions and so on are a big plus for us. Blend and Silverlight seem to be tailored very well to fit this requirement. However it does need the runtime which is somewhat acceptable for us but also a little disadvantage.
So, do you know an mature Ria-like alternatives (similar ease of development, all-in-one-happy-package without runtime) outside of this ecosystem? I had a look at Qt and the designer but I'm not sure what to make of it in the moment with all the buzz about it and if it is fitting to our needs.
Are there other alternatives you can recommend?
Thanks in advance.
If you're familiar with .NET technologies and looking at Silverlight from that perspective, its may be the way to go in that you will be using the same tools. Silverlight is also cross-platform on desktops.
Adobe Air as far as I can tell can be many things, one or more combininations of flash, flex, javascript, html. This is also cross platform in terms of desktop machines.
Html/jQuery/Javascript is another option, this also enables usage on mobile devices.
There are 3rd party plugins/add-ons and components for most of these technologies that help with both features and the visual aspect of the interface.
There is Adobe AIR, but I'm not familiar with it.
Just so I understand, here is what I hear you saying: you want designers to design the UI and developers to develop the code.
Your problem is that developing for Silverlight requires the Silverlight runtime? I'm not sure I get this, but here are some thoughts:
1) If your designers are running Windows you can install just Expression Studio and Blend should include all you need for them to do their work in Blend.
2) If your designers are NOT running Windows, they can't use Blend. They can still do their design work in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop because those assets can then be imported into Blend. Of course, whoever does the import will need a Windows machine with at least Blend installed: in that sort of scenario we call that person an "integrator", and there are folks out there who specialize in that sort of work.
3) If your developers are going to create Silverlight applications, they will need Windows and .NET developers tools (preferably Visual Studio). To paraphrase what AnthonyWJones said earlier: how can you develop for a platform without having the platform?
In my mind, having Visual Studio and Blend is the "all-in-one happy package", but that's just me. :)
Recently I've stumbled over surface. It's incredible and so easy to develop small applications with surface. Surface is build upon WPF, so surface uses XAML. My idea is now to develop applications with surface. I've searched for some information about this topic. There is nothing about that. My question is now, why nobody uses the surface SDK with WPF to build cool applications. Are there any disadvantages?
I don't really understand your question. But here are some answers to what you may be asking:
Why aren't there more surface applications out there?
Most likely because of the price and the availability. It costs $15,000 for a developer unit and you have to be a business to even get to order it.
Why isn't the surface SDK used to build normal desktop apps
Because it doesn't make sense. The surface SDK contains Surface specific, and multi touch specific additions to the plain WPF stack so it is only useful for surface applications running on a real surface device (or simulator, but that isn't feasible for deployment)
Now if you are building a multi touch application for windows 7, there is a surface toolkit which is based upon the surface SDK. It has most of the nice multi touch enhancements but lacks the hard dependency on the surface hardware. It is very useful for general purpose multi touch development on .NET and is as far as I can tell also used quite much for this purpose.
Do you mean building Windows applications in WPF using the Surface toolkit? There is no reason not to do this. There is a 'good, better, best' model when developing multitouch apps, and if you want to create a true multitouch friendly application, then the Surface toolkit is a good way to go.
I have created an application using the surface toolkit but for normal wpf application.
You have just to have a multitouc tactil monitor.
and every thing will be fine.
It works :)