Cocktail overview

Cocktail is an application development platform that takes the pain out of the development of data-driven Rich Internet Applications (RIA) for Silverlight, WPF, and soon Metro. Cocktail leverages established patterns and practices, such as MVVM, and builds on DevForce's rich data service capabilities.

RIA

Silverlight has been the platform of choice for writing line-of-business (LOB) rich internet applications (RIA). A typical LOB application often deals with data coming from a central database and not only needs to read data, but also needs to modify or create data. The first challenge in writing RIA-style applications is how to shuttle data back and forth between the UI and the back-end. This challenge is made more difficult due to the asynchronous nature of web requests.

Microsoft created WCF RIA Services, a free, but immature framework to address this challenge. At IdeaBlade, we offer a much more mature product called DevForce. A free version (limited to 10 entity types) can be downloaded from our website http://www.ideablade.com/products/free-trial/free-trial.aspx.

MVVM

On the UI side of the equation we have MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel), an architectural pattern that originated from Microsoft and is based on the much older MVC pattern. MVVM is not a framework. It is a way to structure how the the UI interacts with the domain model of an application. Recently, a number of popular MVVM frameworks have emerged, such as Prism, Caliburn Micro, and MVVM Light.

End to end

Despite having DevForce, WCF RIA Services, and the various MVVM frameworks, putting together all the pieces is still a challenge. Cocktail is an application development platform that brings DevForce and Caliburn Micro together, and provides an end-to-end foundation for building an application. The goal of the platform is to keep the noise out of the source code, so that our developers can focus on solving the actual business problems and not worry about the plumbing and wiring. 

High level architecture

Videos

• The Cocktail YouTube playlist contains all of the Cocktail videos listed below.
  
  
• Cocktail: TempHire overview
• Cocktail: TempHire in Action
• Cocktail: Building TempHire
• Cocktail: TempHire solution structure (WPF)
• Cocktail: TempHire solution structure (Silverlight)
• Cocktail: TempHire domain model
• Cocktail: TempHire domain services
• Cocktail: TempHire main project
• Cocktail: TempHire main project (the shell)
• Cocktail: TempHire main project (view composition)
• Cocktail: TempHire main project (UI and miscellaneous components)