I'll try to explain as briefly as possible:
C#.Windows application for categories and descriptions of files.
Windows Forms - for the user
A library I want to be saved for future usage - I got nice algorithms for tasks with XML,Files,strings. In this case they are to serve the WF, but i don't want to keep them in the Form classes. I want to have them as a separate library with namespaces and classes in it. But I don't know what type of project or addition to the whole VS "Solution" that has to be.
Windows Service - get notifications on file changes and updates the same db the WF is using.
LINQ to SQL - for the data access
WCF - I am just throwing that here, because it seems that I need to use it(answer from a previous related topic) : https://stackoverflow.com/a/15998122/1356685
SO...yeah...architecture, architecture. Any guideline for a good architecture in my case is welcomed. Now I know in these conversations people start throwing terms like: "business logic","persistence layer","model layer" and what not. However I don't quite understand them, so please be specific.
Thanks in advance for the help !
Microsoft has a pretty extensive application architecture guide and their patterns and practices website has a lot of information and code samples showing you how to structure applications.
As for your 'library to be saved for future usage'... you can create a C# Class Library project and add it as a Reference in whatever applications you'd like to use it in.
Related
Im starting a new project. The aim of the project is to create a e-authoring tool for building courses in SCORM Complaint. Im new to this domain and I have little idea on this. I have taken a view on authoring tool in Articulate, which my customer requires to do the same. I understood the content creation, but I am trying to understand How can I export this as SCORM compliant course? In between I learned about xAPI as well And understood it is a kind of enhanced SCORM.
Could any one guide me to understand this,
1) How can create content from my custom authoring tool and export as SCORM complaint
2) Is it better to use xAPI or SCORM.
3) How is the SCORM pacakge communicate with my custom made LMS?
4) Heard about LRS,
My custom authoring tool will be made in React and store would MondDB
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thankyou!
That is a lot to take on, particularly all at once.
1) The SCORM spec is made up of multiple parts. There is a packaging portion and a runtime portion. The basics are that your package needs to be a zip file, and that zip needs to include specific files that indicate to the LMS what type of standard it is along with other metadata about the package. For SCORM this will be called an imsmanifest.xml file. For xAPI you are most likely going to use a cmi5.xml (see cmi5) or a tincan.xml file (what Articulate Storyline exports when it says "xAPI"). The other parts of the package will depend on what standard and version of that standard (for SCORM 1.2, 2004 2nd, 3rd, or 4th edition) you are targeting, realizing that different LMSs support different standards and different degrees of those standards.
Once you have a package constructed that will import, the content itself (usually an HTML file) will need to locate the JavaScript API provided by the SCORM player (from the LMS) and make specific calls depending on what the content is needing to store or read, this is the runtime portion. The calls will again depend on the standard and version. For xAPI based packages (either tincan.xml packages or cmi5 packages) the content will communicate directly to the LRS based on the information provided on the URL at launch time (there is no built in JavaScript API).
2) This entirely depends on what your customer base looks like and the types of data that you intend to capture. SCORM is a more mature landscape and has wider adoption and is more heavily specified, if the information you need to capture fits into its limited information model then it is still an excellent choice. If you need significant data portability and/or the information you need to capture goes beyond compliance data (pass/fail, complete, and score) and/or interaction data (questions + answers) then you should consider xAPI, specifically via cmi5.
3) The LMS must provide a JavaScript API (specified by the SCORM runtime) which the content will use as its interface. The storage/retrieval of data is implementation specific for the LMS beyond what is included in the specification for the JavaScript API.
4) You didn't really include a question here.
I would suggest familiarizing yourself with the two sets of standards via http://scorm.com and http://xapi.com. And although it is a plug for my company's product, you may want to consider the Rustici Driver as it is a product (library) specifically designed to make it easy for an authoring tool to export content as SCORM 1.2, 2004, AICC, cmi5 or Tin Can (the latter two being xAPI). Once you have your tool up and running with minimal standards support you should consider testing it on Rustici's SCORM Cloud (it is free for this purpose), see http://cloud.scorm.com.
The format is huge, there is no quick reference guides. And different authoring tools have different scorm-support depths. You should probably start with this document
Sounds like you're talking about designing editable content; and the content "framework" itself.
This is a massive effort! This is massive support! That said, people do it.
Having built a CMS system for many supporting subject matters I had to divide and conquer this task.
Few ways I'd think to digest this beast- data, data, data
Requirements on Activities (Interaction types)
Design (static/dynamic) on these interactions
The view/facade displaying can change. Tech moves at the speed of light. Need to come up with a super solid data model.
I'd think about how these can be generic, and how they can be extended to meet the customers goals/needs. All depends how much customization (if any) can happen.
I start mapping all this to SCORM CMI Object level calls. Scoring, Progress, Interactions, Objectives etc...
Get your self a wicked SCORM Content API library or write one yourself. You'll be re-using a lot of these calls, no sense baking them into all your interactions
Get up on SCORM Packaging .. much of this has to be defined at author time. Lots of reading, and a lot of features you need to pick thru if your customers even use. Don't dev in places that have .1% market need. The low hanging fruit get you to market.
Surround yourself with passionate great people. You'll need them.
As far as the standards go, it's all about portability. SCORM works directly with a LMS if thats where your customer goes. Others use a LRS which is coded to work with one they set at author time. You can even do both.
Aside from React and MongoDB, you'll need something that can do the lift and shift of all this content.
I need to build an offline database application on WP7.
App is simple - it's about making orders from our clients, then translate it to main server (MS SQL).
Spend a days read about existing techologies - but I'am still confused. Which is right for that project?
Sync Framework.
Looking good, but as I understand - it provides single tables - no reference beetwen them. All the references I have to build on client side. Sad.
Entity FrameWork on server side.
And I have no clue - what can I use on client side. Is there a way to serialize entity object to Isolate Store, then restore it, and continue work with it? May be I can use Sync FrameWork, but scheme will become strange then - kinda one way.)))
Working with WCF & XML - most simple for me. A lot of code and conversion, but in this case I understand the data flow. In other view - I already have app with pure SQL-queries. I wanna be advanced. ))))
Using ext. databases (siaqodb for example).
Which one? siaqodb suppots "Sync provider", but it doesn't support references beetwen objects - so I have to build them by myself? Any gain? I don't know.
Is there another way to build such apps? Point it please.
If this has to be done offline, then I would generally use something like:
storing the minimal amount of the required data within isolated using a WP7 specific database like Sterling
using either a new REST or a new RIA/WCF service with objects/functions you define in order to provide the required data synchronisation
I think this is your option 3?
I've never really liked automatic data synchronisation. I just find it easier to code the sync and deal with the error cases myself - this is especially the case if your wp7 client app uses quite a small footprint of data in relation to the larger main server db.
So I have been looking around the internet for a good explanation of how lift works concerning databases. I have not found anything very helpful yet. What I am looking for is a simple explanation or code example that can show how lift connects to its databases to perform transactions and how to use this to create new tables, models or update and edit existing tables.
For example: with django i fairly easily figured out how it generated database tables from model classes and executed updates on them through methods it inherited from the framework.
I am trying to create a simple app at the moment that would have users, information about them, posts on a website, etc.
I am currently reading through the available Lift books and would greatly appreciate more help in learning how to use lift.
Lift configures it's data source in Boot.scala.
if (!DB.jndiJdbcConnAvailable_?) {
val vendor =
new StandardDBVendor(Props.get("db.driver") openOr "org.h2.Driver",
Props.get("db.url") openOr
"jdbc:h2:lift_proto.db;AUTO_SERVER=TRUE",
Props.get("db.user"), Props.get("db.password"))
LiftRules.unloadHooks.append(vendor.closeAllConnections_! _)
DB.defineConnectionManager(DefaultConnectionIdentifier, vendor)
}
It can generate table schemas for you using Schemifier:
Schemifier.schemify(true, Schemifier.infoF _, User,Post,Tag,PostTags)
For general Lift project, you can just use Lift Mapper as an ORM tool, it's not complete but works for most of the cases.
You can refer to Lift WIKI and Simply Lift(Written by the Author) or Explore Lift.
From my perspective, the documents available so far are rather disappointing.
It's said the Lift in Action is very well written, but won't come out till this summer, you can read it from MEAP.
In the Exploring Lift book, the PocketChange example contains code showing how to define a User using MetaProtoUser and other features. I would start there for a better understanding of Lift, model and the built-in CRUD and User prototype objects.
http://exploring.liftweb.net/master/index-2.html#toc-Chapter-2
Keep in mind that the 'new' approach to DB integration will be via the Record. This is very much a work in progress, so I wouldn't rush to start learning it.
You can also look at the source for Lift in Action to get some ideas. Here's a link to the travel app built in the first couple chapters
https://github.com/timperrett/lift-travel
And to the source code for the entire book. Chapter 10 is the Mapper chapter.
https://github.com/timperrett/lift-in-action
The default ORM in Lift is Mapper which gives you among other things a quick path to CRUD functionality for your DB entities.
However if you would like a more traditional JPA persistence approach (or rather SPA since entities would in that case be written in scala), i usually find very useful the JPA-like sample application that is part of the Lift distribution. To try it out, assuming maven is installed, just type:
mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeRepository=http://scala-tools.org/repo-snapshots -DarchetypeGroupId=net.liftweb -DarchetypeArtifactId=lift-archetype-jpa-basic_2.8.1 -DarchetypeVersion=2.3-SNAPSHOT -DgroupId=org.mycompany.myproject -DartifactId=MyProject -Dversion=1.0
This will create a MyProject Lift project, containing a simple library application with 2 entities (Author and Book) having a one-to-many relationship as well as CRUD snippets showing how you can create and edit such entities in a jdbc compliant database.
I would like to extend my WinForms app, which a feature that allows me to monitor which functions are used by the users.
The idea is to count how many times e.g. a button has been clicked, or a popup was opened.
I want to know which features are used more or less often by the users.
Any ideas how this can be done? (Or even if somebody solved this problem already)
tia,
Martin
The only mechanism I can think on to do what your looking for is to use a logger like log4net / Log4PostSharp to log details to a log file on the machine, this would give you details on usage for that particular client. You would have to create a custom attribute that you could decorate your methods with that would result in something being written out to the log file, otherwise your code would end up littered with code to implement the logging!
Have a look at this article too, it uses Log4PostSharp with AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming) which would make the implementation of the logging much more cleaner (uses attributes).
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dotnet/log4postsharp-intro.aspx
You can find some if you google for the term "application analytics" instead of "feature tracking".
I have found the following products:
includeapp.com
Software Statistics Service
Dotfuscator for .NET, DashO for Java
FusionAnalytics
Flurry Analytics
OpenSpan Desktop Analytics
DeskMetrics
EQATEC Analytics
Rapidengines
I might say that I also plan to create such a product. When it will be Beta I will add it to the list.
I know it has great out-of-the-box features but is it easy to customize?
Like when I query stuff from the database or change css layouts.
Is it faster to create my own modules for it or just go on and write everything from scratch using frameworks like Cake
I'm currently working on an Elgg-based site and I absolutely hate it. The project was near completion when I stepped in, but the people who created were no longer available, so I took it over as a freelancer.
As a personal impression, you are much better off writing the app from scratch in a framework. I don't know if the people before me butchered it, but the code looks awful, the entity-based relationship model is wierd to say the least and debugging is horrendous. Also, from my point of view, it doesn't scale very well. If you were to have a consistent user base, I'd be really really worried.
It keeps two global objects ($vars and $CONFIG) that have more than 5000(!) members loaded in memory on each page. This is a crap indicator.
I've worked extensively with cake. With Elgg, for about a month in a project that is on QA stage right now.
My advise is: if you need something quick with a lot of features and you only need to customize a little, go with Elgg.
If you're going to customize a lot and you can afford the development of all the forums, friends, invites, etc. features, go with Cake or any other MVC framework.
I have been working on a Elgg site for the past month or so, its code is horrible, however it's not the worst I've seen :D. it's not built for programmers like Drupal is :D. But it's not too bad. Once I got a handle on the metadata functions and read most of the code I was able to navigate it well and create custom modules and such.
What would help immensely would be some real documentation and explanation of the Elgg system. I don't think that's going to happen though :).
Out of the box there are a few problems, there are some bugs that haven't been fixed for a while and I've had to go in and fix them myself. Overall, you can make it pretty and it has some cool functions, but i wouldn't dive in until i had read the main core code to get a handle on what's happening on the backend.
Oh and massive use of storing values in globals. and a crap ton of DB calls (same with Drupal though).
i wonder if the use of storing everything, and i mean everything for your site in the globals will really hinder the server if you have a massive user load.
If you want to build a product based on a social networking platform/framework then Elgg is definately a good way to go. The code is not that bad if you actually look before leaping and doing what elgg expects. You go against its processes and structures and it will leave you beaten by the side of the road.
Developing modules/plugins or editing CSS is easy and Elgg does give you great flexability to basically build your own product ontop of it. Dolphin, as comparrison, does not allow you to do anything outside of what it expects you to do.
If you however just need a framework (not primarily for social networking etc) with some user based functionality then i suggest Cake, or if your project is HUGE then maybe Symfony or Zend. They all have plugins you can download and use/hack which would be easirer to adjust for personalised needs.
To show what you can do with elgg here is a site Mobilitate we built with Elgg 1.7. This is a very complicated website and was built ontop of Elgg.
We are starting a new project with Elgg 1.8. The new version is a major improvement they have made a lot of elements easier, incorporated better JS and CSS implementation/structure and have better commented their own code.
Elgg's database schema is horrific. They've essentially implemented a NoSQL database in SQL. It completely defeats the purpose of using a relational table structure.
If you can ignore this, and aren't doing much customization, you might be OK with Elgg. If not, STAY AWAY.
I've been working with Elgg for over a year. It is easier to customize than it would be to build something from scratch using a framework like CakePHP. I tried CakePHP and found it even more complicated than Elgg.
It is difficult to query the database due to the entity-based relationship model. You should use the build-in methods for accessing data. However, I have written many queries to double check on what is actually stored in the database.
You cannot change layouts using CSS alone. You have to deal with the various Elgg views. But CakePHP uses the same Model/View/Controller MVC concept so that would be just as difficult.