Something in the works?

[patrick]

Hi,

Great to see the new forum section dedicated to Windows Presentation Foundation. Hope this is a sign that progress is being made on that front!

I actually posted a message yesterday in the General section thanking the spring team for all their work to date (you guys sure make my .NET experience more enjoyable) and asking what the current status is of the WinForms related modules. I have seen a couple of mentions to WinForms modules in particular by Aleks and Mark in a few posts over the years in this forum but can't find any code in CVS or elsewhere.

Strangely my post was deleted and my account banned (reason: spammer), perhaps because my username was "patspam". Anyway, I've registered a new account. Hope to hear some info about Windows Presentation Foundation and/or WinForms!

Thanks,

Patrick

[Bruno Baia]

Hi Patrick,

You are too fast ! We just created the forum and already one post :D
Sorry for your account ban... We have been spammed a lot recently
I've reactivated your account, but the thread has been permantly deleted :(

I've just created a sticky post about our initial support for WPF :
http://forum.springframework.net/showthread.php?t=985


Bruno

[patrick]

Thanks for the reply Bruno.

Back to the topic of my question, what is the status/roadmap for WinForms/WPF related modules? Does anything exist for either presentation frameworks yet? Does the Spring.NET team have either ear-marked for future releases?

The reason I ask is having gotten hooked on Spring in the Data and Business Services layers of my current Windows app I'd love to be able to leverage it in my presentation layer too.

Cheers,

Patrick

[Aleks Seovic]

I think we can get a set of features similar to the ones found in the Spring.Web implemented fairly quickly for WinForms (no WPF, just standard WinForms). However, there was some work and quite a bit of code has been committed to the sandbox for the full-blown CAB-like WinForms framework.

I wasn't involved, so I really have no idea of the state that code is in and if anything that is there can be used right now (at your own risk, of course). If you are interested into Spring.Web-like features in WinForms, such as automatic DI, data binding, data validation and localization, we can try to enable some of that stuff. It really shouldn't be too much work.

Later,

Aleks

[harald]

I started playing a bit with WinForms and Spring.NET a while ago. I have set up a sandbox myself at http://springutils.fluffnstuff.org/ with some yet undocumented classes that I use for my projects.

What I've done so far:

* DI and the GUI Designer don't play very well together, I've tried a few different approaches to cope with this issue, but with rather limited success. The best I can come up with (e.g. for injecting Validators to Forms) is making the Forms IApplicationContextAware and but a "Adapter" Component on the form that loads its dependencies from the ApplicationContext. Not yet the best solution I can think of, but better than hardcoding ...

* I extended the ErrorsRenderer and implemented a BaseForm class to be able to do rather nice Form Validation based on the Spring Validation Framework

* I conceptually implemented a WizardForm, again with validation, per wizard page of course. There's a lot to improve, but it works pretty nice already.

* I added more databinding capabilities to the existing ListView control.

* I implemented a customizable login dialog to initialize a session factory with login credentials.

* to be continued ...

If someone can provide me access to the spring sandbox I would be happy to contribute this stuff.


Ah yes ... and of course there is http://nhibernate.fluffnstuff.org/ which is a small NHibernate extension to be able to use DataBinding together with NHibernate mapped collections.

harald.

[D.T. Honig]

I am exploring all the same topics. Is there code currently for these in nightly releases? It is hard for me to access the repositories from behind the firewall but I am dealing with all of these issues and would love to collaborate on working towards the best solution. I'm greatly inspired by the work that Marc Clifton has done with MyXAML and like his approach greatly. In particular I could see spring wiring up events between MVC such as his articles describe and as illustrated in MyXAML. I am also very interested in data binding and validation so how can we proceed?
If anyone is willing to share code I'd love to get it and review it. Very anxious to get going on this so let me know who is interested in collaborating.

Best,
-DH

[harald]

I am - harald.

[D.T. Honig]

Should we get a thread for Windows Forms Integration? I have picked up Haralds code and am just about finished getting my head around it and see quite a bit of pontential for us to get something in the sandbox.

[harald]

Glad to hear :) I have the impression that besides you and me there is not much "active participation" yet. maybe we should just kick-off an initial implementation and try to gain more momentum until there is some need for another thread. for now this would just be yet another spam trap,

harald

[Aleks Seovic]

Hi,

I am very interested in this whole topic, but unfortunately won't have much time to work on it until late January/early February. What Harald described sounds promising and I'm definitely interested to see where it will go.

Probably the fastest and easiest way to work on it for now is to leave it where it is, in harald's repository until you think it's quite complete and ready to be moved. Once you get to that point we can move it either to sandbox or to the main source tree, depending on the state it is in.

BTW, both of you should probably join dev mailing list on sourceforge, as that's the best way for all of us to participate in design discussions. Forums are more for support, so we should move this discussion to the dev list.

Later,

Aleks

[harald]

I made a downloadable release available at http://springutils.fluffnstuff.org/downloads which should serve as a base for further discussions.

[.ben]

Is this going anywhere, I only build windows applications so I'm very interested.