Busy two weeks for the DotVVM Team

The last two weeks were really busy for us. Since DotVVM was involved in the .NET Summer Hackfest initiative, the entire team was really thrilled and finished so many great things! Here is a quick recap of what we have done.

#1: DotVVM Talk

On Monday, August 7th, I had a session about DotVVM in real-world line of business applications. It is in Czech, but I will record the session in English in a few days.

I have been showing the best practices on designing the viewmodels, I have built a pair of master/detail pages, and built a generic viewmodel classes which can save your time if you need to build a lot of CRUDs. I have talked about validation, modal dialogs, diagnostics and performance considerations and other things you may need in line of business applications.

You can look at the sample Northwind application I have been showing during the talk.

#2: DotVVM 1.1.5

On Tuesday, August 8th, we have released DotVVM 1.1.5. Among several bug fixes and improvements, we have added a several new features:

• Parameter Binding which simplifies reading values from route or query string parameters
• Application Insights integration
• MiniProfiler integration

We have also done several fixes to make sure that DotVVM will work with .NET Core 2.0 as there were some API changes in the Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection library.

#3: Theme Editor for Business Pack

As we are finishing the DotVVM Business Pack, a set of controls for enterprise line for business applications, which are built and optimized just for DotVVM, we have launched the Business Pack Theme Editor.

You can see most of the Business Pack controls in action there. You can choose from several themes and color sets we have prepared, and you can also customize the theme completely and generate your own CSS file.

Don’t forget to export the LESS file with variables so you can upload it later and continue with fine-tuning of your theme.

#4: DotVVM 1.2.0 Alpha 1

On Thursday 10th, we have also pushed out the first alpha version of DotVVM 1.2. We don’t recommend to use it in production applications, but we’d love to hear your feedback, especially on the new things we have included in the framework:

• REST API integration: you can add your Swagger JSON file and load data in the GridView control directly from the REST API
• Static Commands on Services: you can inject a service in the view and call any function on it using the staticCommand binding

#5: Business Pack RC1

We have also released DotVVM Business Pack RC 1. The final version will come out at the end of this month, so stay tuned. And if you didn’t joined our Beta Program, you can still do it here.

Even after DotVVM Business Pack is released officially, you will be still able to use the beta for free.

#6: DotVVM and Peachpie Summer Hackfest Event in Prague

On Friday 11th, we have hosted an event in Microsoft Czech Republic. We had the guys from the Peachpie project with us, and we had a really great time. We shared some experience with them, got some feedback on DotVVM from the guys who use it in their applications, and prototyped several awesome features:

• Visual Studio Code extension. It is not published yet, but you will be able to try it out very soon!
• ReactBridge control which allows to host React components in the DotVVM page and bind its data to the viewmodel in both ways.
• FormControls.Enabled property which allows to disable or enable all form controls using a single binding.

#7: New Version of DotVVM for Visual Studio

Today, we have released an update to our Visual Studio extension which provides IntelliSense and project templates for DotVVM applications. We had to do a quite a lot of fixes so it would work in Visual Studio 2017 Update 3 which was just released.

We had a lot of fun with DotVVM these two weeks. Share your thoughts with us on our Gitter!