Choose a template

DevForce provides a number of project templates to help you get started developing your DevForce application.  These templates enhance standard Visual Studio templates to add DevForce-specific assembly references and other files.  We'll review the templates available to help you choose the DevForce project template that's right for your project.

DevForce tutorial videos and sample application are good places to learn about these templates in detail. A brief description of each template follows.

DevForce Windows Phone App

This template generates a solution with a blank Windows Phone application project, along with a web application project to host the DevForce EntityServer. A DevForce Windows Phone application is always an n-tier application and must issue asynchronous queries to the EntityServer to retrieve data.  The template primes the solution with the files you need to get started.

DevForce Windows Store App

This template generates a solution with a blank Windows Store application project, along with a web application project to host the DevForce EntityServer. A DevForce Windows Store application is always an n-tier application and must issue asynchronous queries to the EntityServer to retrieve data.  The template primes the solution with the files you need to get started.

DevForce Silverlight Application

The Silverlight Application Template generates a bare bones solution consisting of the minimum two projects: a Silverlight application project and a web application project.

Both projects are primed with references to the DevForce libraries. In the web project, the Global.asax and Web.config are prepared for DevForce and there's a log folder ready to receive the log file, DevForceDebugLog.xml, that captures the application's server-side activity.

Begin by adding an Entity Framework model to the web project. DevForce generates the full .NET entity classes in the web project and automatically adds links to them in the Silverlight application project. Those links ("shortcuts") appear in the "Shared Code" folder.

Continue by building out the Silverlight UI with views and presentation logic.

This template is used in the simplest DevForce tutorials in which you will often see the DevForce entity model added to the web application solution. A separate model project is generally preferred. 

The Tour of DevForce Silverlight walks you through an example using this template.

DevForce WinForms Application

This template produces a 2-tier solution with a single project targeting Windows Forms technology. The essential elements are in place although all you'll see is an empty Form1 if you build and run. You could add an Entity Framework model to it, use a synchronous query to get some entities, and throw them onto the form in a DataGridView.

A separate model project is generally preferred.

DevForce n-tier WinForms Application

This 3-tier version of the 2-tier WinForms adds a web application project to host the EntityServer. The Form1 is no more revealing but the basics are in place to deploy a server project separately from the Windows Forms client and have the latter pull entities over the wire either synchronously or asynchronously.

DevForce WPF Application

This template produces a 2-tier solution with a single project targeting Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)  technology.  The essential elements are in place although all you'll see, if you build and run it, is an empty MainWindow. You could add an Entity Framework model to it, use a synchronous query to get some entities, and throw them onto the form in a grid.

A separate model project is generally preferred. 

The Tour of DevForce WPF walks you through an example using this template.

DevForce n-tier WPF Application

This 3-tier version of the 2-tier WPF adds a web application project to host the EntityServer. The MainWindow is no more revealing but the basics are in place to deploy a server project separately from the WPF client and have the latter pull entities over the wire either synchronously or asynchronously.