14 DAY TRIAL // Developers that need a tad of help to build rich and interactive web applications leveraging the Microsoft ASP.NET MVC 3 web stack can access free guidance via Project Silk (not related to Project Silk Road). Created by the Microsoft Patterns and Practices Web Guidance Team, Project Silk is live on Microsoft CodePlex and promises to offer guidance for building apps that take advantage of the latest web standards and technologies.
As a part of Project Silk, the Redmond company provided a multi-page interactive web application dubbed Mileage Stats RI.
“Project Silk is a sample application that the MSDN patterns & practices Web Guidance Team has been working on that demonstrates modern web application develop techniques on the Microsoft ASP.NET MVC 3 web stack. The target audience for this guidance project is experienced developers creating enterprise, rich, interactive, web applications,” revealed Rachel Appel, developer evangelist for Microsoft.
“The Project silk application is a Mileage Stats application containing a multi-page interactive UX where pages are rendered without requiring a post back. This creates the illusion of a desktop application. The lack of post backs enable rich UI transitions between pages. The browser application runs very fast because of the client-side data caching.”
Make sure to watch the video embedded at the bottom of this article for a demo of the Mileage Stats app.
According to Appel, guidance is provided for a range of technologies in addition to ASP.NET MVC 3, including jQuery, Entity Framework with SQL CE 4, Unity (for DI/IoC), DotnetOpenAuth w/OpenID, and xUnit & qUnit.
“Project Silk provides guidance for building cross-browser web applications with a focus on client-side interactivity. These applications take advantage of the latest web standards like HTML5, CSS3 and ECMAScript 5 along with modern web technologies such as jQuery, Internet Explorer 9, and ASP.NET MVC3,” reads an excerpt from the project’s description.
Project Silk is available for download here.
Project Silk Mileage Stats Application from Karl Shifflett on Vimeo.