News Untold - Confessions of a developer

A month of reseaching and having fun!

About a month ago, late December, when I was almost done with the next (version 0.8) release of MVC Forum, I decided to take a short break. I had been putting a lot of hours into the project in the fall, and to avoid burning out, it was time to take a break and do something else.

When I feel like that, I often take a step back, put away the projects I'm working on, and take a look at what's happening in the world of web applications, what interesting new client-side frameworks are getting a lot of hype, which new (.Net) server-side library is worth digging into etc. etc.

So now a month later, I've been having a lot of fun trying out some interesting new frameworks - well, new to me anyway.

First off I've taken another look at the interesting "Model-View-View Model" javascript library Knockout. This is what I've been missing for years. Whenever I work on a real web application, not just a content driven site, this is what I've been trying to accomplish. I've even started using Knockout in some of my client projects, so this is a keeper

And to continue with Knockout and another thing I've been looking on in January, the open source content management system, Umbraco, has just been released in version 5, a totally rewritten system, moved from ASP.NET Web Forms to ASP.NET MVC. Knockout is used in the back-office. Umbraco is another keeper. I've been working on version 4 for a couple of years, never getting really excited about it, because it uses ASP.NET Web Forms.

The project I've been working on with Knockout, is a web-site where the users can share to-do lists, and in the name of learning new things, I took a look at SignalR, an async signaling library for .NET. I'm probably not going to use SignalR anyway, but I've decided on getting a simple project up and running with it, as it might come in handy later on on other projects.

So where does this leave MVC Forum?

Well, I'll slowly start working seriously on MVC Forum again now. The things I've learned in the last month might not be of any use with MVC Forum, but then again it might. So hopefully in the next few months I'll get MVC Forum to version 1.0, and then, depending on the support, I might decide to put even more time into the project. If you want to talk about the project with me, live, join me in the MVC Forum room on Jabbr

Categories: MVC Forum - Umbraco - SignalR - Knockout