12/19/2012 02:37:46
After several days of testing, bug fixing, more testing and some release preparation, the release of Presentation Engine 4.0 has become a reality! The project page for it has been updated appropriately so if you are interested, click on through and grab it. Here is a list of the improvements:
[1] All of the admin interfaces as well as some end user interfaces will now be rendered dynamically on the same page as the content you are editing using handlebars and ajax calls to read/write/delete the data. This has resulted in a very much improved administration experience and manages to resurrect some of the convenient capabilities from PEngine 3.0 involving being able to log back in without losing your work after your session times out and you attempt to make a change. The new uploader admin tool is quite slick indeed.
[2] The back end database has been upgraded. After 12 years of using MS Access as the back end (with lots of caching protecting it from DoS conditions originating from the front end) the time has come to transition to something better. In this case that something better is SQL Server Compact. The system is designed to automatically convert any data in the existing access database into an automatically created SQL Server CE database when the app first launches so the transition should be seamless. In addition the database interfaces have changed. Rather than making use of a custom data layer, PEngine now makes use of Microsoft's Entity Framework. Yes it was a pain. We laughed, we cried and somewhere along the way we learned to live peacefully together.
[3] The application has been modified to take the constraints imposed by shared hosting environments into consideration. Namely this means that the app will now operate in medium trust mode without issue. All features have been tested verified as operational in this kind of environment.
[4] There has been a cleansing of code and consideration for features that are never going to make it back into this application. Namely this involves the forum feature which as nobody will recall, was a big feature of the last ASP Classic release, 3.0. It was never ported to the .NET versions of PEngine because it seemed pointless. It seems even more pointless nowadays.
[5] Site functionality no longer renders in the same area as the content buttons. This allows us to make it clear to users which user interface elements represent content and which user interface elements allow them to manage their site experience. Admin/Experience functionality is now rendered across the top of every page in the application, where content elements will render in the same place as before. This has the side effect of removing some of the clutter that was present in the user interface before now.
[6] There are now two downloads. One for deployment and another for development. Due to Visual Studios 2012 way of handling things (especially in regards to being able to perform a bin deployment with the app into a shared hosting environment, the development download comes with a large number of libraries. The deployment download is about a third of the size. Despite this the development archive does not include the nuget packages that Visual Studio requires to create a deployment, so those will have to be downloaded manually by the developer.
It's been a long road... so for now let me just say: So long and thanks for all the fish!