30 October 2007

CCF HAT - Making use of DDAs from Legacy Adapters

Although Data Driven Adapters (DDAs) are mainly designed for Automation Adapters in HAT, we can make use of them from legacy adapters, too. Here's an example of an external VB application, which is configured to use a legacy application adapter and a WinDataDrivenAdapter with the corresponding bindings:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding...

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26 October 2007

CCF 2008 Hosted Application Toolkit

The Hosted Application Toolkit (HAT) is a new component of CCF 2.6 (2008) that facilitates the task of automating the UI of the hosted applications. It consists of two main parts: the Data Driven Adapters (DDA) and the Automations (WF workflows) that automates the hosted application using the DDAs.

Data Driven Adapters

DDAs must inherit from DataDrivenAdapterBase in Microsoft.Ccf.HostedApplicationToolkit. CCF supports two implementations out of the box: WinDataDrivenAdapter and WebDataDrivenAdapter. We can inherit from any of the three to extend the DDA as necessary. The methods the DDAs expose to manipulate the hosted application UI are ExecuteControlAction, FindControl, GetControlValue and SetControlValue. These methods take a friendly name as parameter and lets the application adapters interact with the hosted application UI abstracting from the details of how to obtain the control from that friendly name. The mapping between the controls' friendly names and the directions for the DDA to finding them is called Data Driven Adapter Binding and is part of the hosted app initialization string:...

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08 October 2007

Silverlight article published this month

My colleagues Ariel Neisen, Federico GarcĂ­a, Rodolfo Finochietti and I wrote the cover article of the #42 edition of the .Code Magazine (in Spanish) about Silverlight. The article talks about this new technology's fundamentals, architecture, programming tools, advanced features, code samples and a lot more.

01 October 2007

Choosing the right WCF binding

A WCF binding is the endpoint component that defines how the client needs to communicate with the service. It groups settings such as underlying transport protocol, security requirements, and message encoding.

WCF provides nine built-in bindings:

  1. BasicHttpBinding: Basic web service communication. Exposes WCF services as legacy ASMX web services. Used for interoperability. No security by default.
  2. WSHttpBinding: Web services with WS-* support. Supports transactions and reliable messaging.
  3. WSDualHttpBinding...

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