Luminous Group and the .NET Framework
Microsoft’s .NET Framework is a way of consistently approaching and utilizing all of
Microsoft’s programmable assets, now and for the foreseable future - and Luminous Group has the
know-how and experience to bring that to you - today.
Our team has been working with .NET since its introduction in 2001 and has tremendous experience
in employing this framework to build next-generation applications
and can put that experience to work for you. Whether it is a web application, desktop application,
interoperability, integrating legacy code, Luminous Group can work with your company to ensure its applications
are providing the greatest level of service to the people in your organization.
In October, 2006 Microsoft released.NET 3.0, a powerful set of
extensions to .NET 2.0.
They are:
Windows Workflow Foundation
This is a set of tools that take care of the details of implementing workflow. This, in and of itself is not so new. Workflow has been done for years without workflow programming frameworks, but we find the framework to be a much more straightforward approach to model several activities that should execute in parallel, freeing the
programmer from focusing on the details of setting up different threads, synchronization between these, and having the application thread to wait until all have completes.
The design-time work surface where one can draw their workflow does for workflow applications and programming what Windows Forms does for building basic GUI front-ends. The whole framework saves time, allows us to focus on solving our customer’s
problems.
Windows Communications Framework
In the past, when working with .NET one has often had to choose between web services or remoting or some other distributed protocol for building applications that run across several computers. Since the initial launch of .NET, it became clear that on many levels web services did not fully meet the needs of real-world application requirements. For example, features like authentication and transactions were not available for web services. So, in those cases you might use remoting. WCF does away with multiple approaches and unifies the distributed model under which .NET-based architectures should be built. I could not be more pleased. Additionally, interaction with other technologies, such as Sun’s J2EE are actually supported. This is such a big step in aligning corporate interests with real-world implementation. The framework is lightweight, robust, and makes it easier than ever before to build industrial-strength distributed applications.
Windows Presentation Framework
Despite these back-end improvements, we know that what users really respond to is a UI. And in this era, with AJAX-style web applications and the continued strength and development of the Macintosh UI, Microsoft have developed a new markup language, XAML, that enables the development of design-side tools (such as Expression Blend) that integrate fully with Visual Studio .NET. Just to put this into perspective, when Microsoft moved from the ASP model to ASP.NET in 2001, they introduced the notion of the code-behind web page. This allowed programmers to work in their .NET language of choice to perform procedural code tasks while enabling designers and / or HTML experts to focus on the look and feel of the page in declarative HTML. XAML provides this, but in a fashion that is far more powerful and far-reaching.
Contact us on (866) 495-7354 to arrange for a free consultation. We are happy to
meet with you to evaluate your business goals systems, applications, and requirements.
We then prepare written proposal of what we can do for you.