We have a Canvas Power App which connects to a SharePoint Data Source. We also have multiple Power Automate Flows that manipulate this same data after certain triggers (when created, when updated, etc). None of these components are in a Power Apps solution.
After reading about the benefits of Solutions in the Power Platform, my question is this:
If I was to create a new Power Apps Solution and then import both the pre-existing Canvas App and the Power Automate Flows, can I expect the solution to continue to function correctly?
What potential issues might I run into?
For context, both the Canvas app and the workflows are used daily by staff.
ALM improvements are really good these days wrt Power Platform, especially for Canvas apps and PA Cloud flows. They are continuously improving as well.
Notable improvements are Connections, Connection references, Environmental variables and the Solutions can include the Flows, Canvas apps like any other Dataverse/Dynamics CRM components.
Definitely some will break after deployment in target environment and it really depends on your customizations and development strategies. I’m not sure how this was deployed in target environment in first place, they were exported and imported as packages probably.
So I recommend you to dry run / test the deployment thoroughly using solution from source to another target sandbox environment before doing deployment to real Prod environment with users actively using them.
I'm about to start a fairly large project. I have about 10 different PC/MAC Flash(AS 2.0)/MDM Zinc software packages I have inherited from a previous programmer. They are a series of math educational applications that are all contained on numerous CDs which is pretty frustrating for our customers. I've been tasked with converting these applications into a digital medium with emphasis on iOS/Droid compatibility.
They don't want to ditch the flash because of the way it's written and compiled with MDM Zinc it would almost require a complete rewrite. Currently the customer installs the application using Disc 1 of their set and the application will pull the lesson material (SWF files) from the discs in the set. I want to move these lessons onto a web server and build a single client app. Something that just works as a generic container for these lessons.
Currently I'm using Visual Studio 2012 and Xamarin to build these containers. Unfortunately my strongest languages is vb.net and not C# though so It's taking a little getting used to. Does anyone have any tips or light they may be able to shed on the best way to go about getting a foot hold in this project?
I've pretty much decided I'm going to have to build this "container" from the ground up. Here is an example of the software I'm working with http://184.168.83.81/Math7Demo/movie100.htm
Thanks in advance
As a fellow developer who works with e-Learning for almost a decade, I'd say your best bet is to build the containers with PhoneGap, convert the SWFs with Google Swiffy and load them as HTML inside your app.
Microsoft are pushing their ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) tools such as TFS very hard but often gloss over the fact that major features are only available for managed (.Net) code. eg: Intellitrace is c# and VB-only
Are there any benefits to using Lab Management with a pure native application?
We have two major apps, one with a Java UI and the other MFC. There have been suggestions that the Lab Manager will be broadly rolled-out in the company but I have strong doubts that we will gain anything.
According to this March 2011 table of test automation support, Java is not supported and MFC only for basic controls.
[edit] Prior to the latest vNext release, we couldn't use their TestManager for unit tests unless we wrap our C++ code in .Net layers with C++/CLI unit tests.
So it seems that none of the various ways of testing code can be used for our apps.
Absolutely! Lab Management could help out quite a bit for all sorts of non-.NET applications. It's great for setting up development or test environments made up of multiple machines. You can use the data collectors with Microsoft Test Managers to collect rich data from each of the machines in your environments when you are running test cases or performing exploratory testing. Whenever you find a bug, you can file a bug and each of the data collectors on each of the machines in the environment under test will be queried and attached to a pretty nice bug report for you. You can snapshot, rollback, etc. You can automate test runs and deployments of builds to environments.
You can use Lab Management even with shared or dedicated environments per testers. If your environments require it, you could even use network isolation between the environments to make sure clones of the environments don't cause problems with other clones.
Lab Management also helps if you need to test your apps against multiple configurations. Imagine you need to test your MFC or Java app on Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003, etc. You could spin up individual environments with the different configurations and test against each of them appropriately. Microsoft Test Manager can keep track of pass/fail results for your test cases in each of those configurations as well.
You're absolutely right though. Certain data collectors that come out of the box won't work well or not at all with non-.NET applications. However, the data collector system is completely extensible. If there is something you want to automatically gather, you can create your own custom data collector for use in Lab Management.
There's a lot you can take advantage in Lab Management with testing against non-.NET applications.
Unit tests for native C++ are supported in Visual Studio 11 so there is no need for wrappers. see this article. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh270864(v=VS.110).aspx
This is a two part question:
I would like to know where does Oracle ADF 11g stand as a framework to develop / deploy Web / Java EE Applications as compared to other frameworks.
How much is Oracle ADF being used as a framework to Develop Web Applications.
I am asking from a perspective that whether or not there are good job opportunities as an Oracle ADF Developer and what the future looks like for those holding Oracle ADF skills.
Also as Oracle plans to use ADF as core technology for Fusion Applications, Is it good time to build Oracle ADF skills as a siebel developer? As the future Oracle CRM Applications like ERP, SCM will be based on ADF should developers start building ADF skills. Around when will customers start implementing those applications based on ADF. Will these be available On Premise or mostly On Demand in SaaS way.
We have chosen Oracle ADF in our company for one of our projects. Sadly, this proved to be a big mistake. I personally have used Oracle products, in particular their DB, but as far as fusion middleware is concerned, I would advise you to stay away from it. ADF was by far the worst framework I have ever used as an architect. Some of its features I noticed are: very complex, Oracle just "invents" or forces some development approaches that have been proven as a bad practice by the Java community years ago. ADF is very slow compared to other frameworks. With being slow I mean ADF pages run slow. The reason for this is extremely complex generated html and javascript. You can check this by opening up Firebug and inspecting the generated html...it looks like something from the 90s...Terrible. Not to be overly pedantic, but ADF pages have huge amounts of validation errors causing problems in making them run on all browsers. The architecture of ADF is, in my view, messy. Struts2 for example is a much cleaner framework which makes it very easy to integrate it with 3rd party libraries such jQuery, etc. Oracle advocates ADF as an MVC framework but frankly I failed to see the actual MVC architecture there.
ADF uses its own javascript libraries, which are huge, practically impossible to modify, unoptimized and slow in comparison to others such as jQuery or Prototype. The emerging trends in J2EE are lightweight pluggable frameworks that are easily integrated with other tools such a Spring for managing dependencies, jQuery for scripting, CC for continuous integration. ADF is a heavy-weight tightly-integrated framework with other ORacle tools, which makes it very difficult to use it any other way than Oracle devised.
Not to mention the development tools that you are forced to used when developing ADF - the JDeveloper which is very buggy and crashes regularly. Developing in Eclipse is problematic, because ADF has numerous "specific" files which JDeveloper generates automatically.
All in all...ADF was a huge disappointment for us. We spent months messing with it, when finally our client decided the application was too slow and difficult for them to support it and the cancelled it altogether.
Based on my experience i can only say stay away from it. Choose one of the more supported and architecturally clean solutions such as Struts2 or Spring.
I have used JDeveloper 10 and 11, both with ADF, on two enterprise ADF projects for a prominent defense contractor. I agree that ADF is complex, but disagree that JDev crashes frequently, or that the pages are slow to render.
Now... why ADF? Read Oracle's synopsis below, stating that JDeveloper and ADF make Java EE development more accessible to "business" programmers. While this does not guarantee elegant programs, it does almost certainly guarantee that, when these developers get into trouble with ADF, they will probably be utterly lost and will have little idea how to open the hood and reach inside. Conversely, they would be lost even sooner trying to integrate the current J2EE open-source cornucopia.
THE SERMON
Source: ADF Developer's guide (paraphrased)
"Since the early Java days in the late 1990's , the Jave enterprise platform has grown massively and today is used by a large community of developers. However, the developer community is not homogenous and includes developers who are not expert Java programmers, but are business developers who have core competencies in their industries. As the Java EE platform and community grows, the average programmer skill level is declining.
It's hard to imagine that there is a single developer who understands all aspects of the Java EE platform in depth. The problem to address in Java EE is to provide a technology that empowers developers to build cutting edge web and SOA app's without limiting their agility.
Existing Java frameworks such as Struts, Spring, JSF, EJB, GWT, etc are blankets pulled over areas of complexity that expose simpler controls to work with. Using frameworks, developers no longer work with the java core API's but instead interact with interfaces and services exposed by the framework.
Blah, blah, blah...
What seems a small problem for experienced java developers is another hurdle for business developers who are new to java and EE development. This type of developer may turn to a a single dev environment promising integration of all aspects of app development in a single technology chouice. Developers from a 4GL desktop dev background might be attracted by PLSQL, .NET, Adobe Flash.
An experienced Java developer might see this a a big mistake, but how would those developers know, unless Java too provides a single solution for them? The solution is an end-to-end framework which pulls another blanket over the technologies, one that combines different framewokrs and technologies into a single product that exposes visual and declarative development gestures as it's predominant programming methodology... ADF."
I have been working with ADF since last 6 months, and i realise that ADF is made particularly large application with strong database integration. I haven't seen any other Framework which can provide you with so fast and easy development of database rich applications.
Yes i agree that it have some bugs, but still it works well if you know how to work with it.
My perception of and experience with ADF is that it is a very solid and robust framework (unfortunately, the development tools are not.) I'm not sure there's much competition to it, at least, not from a single framework. ADF itself is really several different frameworks combined over the years into a mostly cohesive product. Now that Oracle owns Java, i really expect (hope) parts/much of ADF finds its way into Java EE-proper so we can maybe see alternative implementations and better development tools. If that were to happen, it'd pretty well solidify ADF's future (as long as Oracle doesn't screw the Java community in the meantime and push them to alternative VM platforms).
If you are already familiar with or want to work with Oracle(-related) products, ADF is what you want. Given the market penetration of Oracle, it's probably a reasonable bet that they'll remain dominant and your skills will remain marketable for years to come. Oracle is spending lots of money and acquiring lots of companies to try to own and retain the enterprise.
The SaaS question, to me, is a little harder to answer. While it does seem to be moving in that direction, it's not clear to me if it's mostly marketing's attempt to give it that push or if business-need is driving it. And there are lots of questions i don't really track such as business trust of the cloud for critical data and reliability.
Short answer:
You developing Enterpise solution, your product vendor is Oracle - ADF is a best choice
You indie developer, your solution is not for enterprise, you not going to use other products in the Oracle stack - ADF is not for you, look for another framework.
Long answer:
If you going to Enterprise, if your general product's stack vendor is Oracle. Your best choise is to go along with ADF. ADF becomes better with each major release. I've started using ADF since 11.1.1.2, had a look at 10.x and now using 12.1.3, while still supporting large enterprise applications on 11.1.1.6.
I see a huge improvement and its really hard to find another product that provide better integration and support for whole Oracle stack.
However, if you quite familiar with other framework or/and not going to use other Oracle products and/or your customers can't afford to pay quite a lot for ADF/Weblogic/DB/ECM etc.. - your best choise is to avoid ADF. Its good for large enterprise solutions.
Yes, in fact actually you can develop using free and limited version of ADF - Essentials, use other app server as tomcat or glassfish, but you'll be better off with the other framework. ADF Essentials is only kickstart to large enterprise world, not a solution for small lightweight application.
Development in ADF is a pain in the heart. For a newcomer, the learning curve is too steep. I wish it could be more like learning dot NET.
From my perspective, learning and constructing a functionality in dot NET takes a quarter of the time to do the same in ADF. Of course, it imbalance reduces as a person learns along, but that's pretty much the scenario for beginners. It's frustrating.
I have been working with ADF since last 3 months, and i can tell you that ADF is a really suitable for situations which is essential to provide fast development process for large enterprise applications with strong database integration.
Compairing to other JavaEE framworks like Spring,
It is extremely complex when fixing bugs becasue of the architechtur of the ADF and lack of dev community relative to Spring. Spring has large development community
around the framework.
It is hard to impliment MVC architecture with the ADF inter component integrations.
Spring Developers have much more reputation and demand compared to ADF developers.
ADF is very slow, heavy-weight, tightly-coupled compared to Spring and integrated framework with Oracle tools.
Hope this will help you to solve your problem and gain your knowledge. Happy coding!!!
I'm a junior VB.net developer with little application design knowledge. I've been reading a lot of material online regarding different design patterns, frameworks, and methodologies. It's become a bit confusing for me.
Right now I'm trying to decide on what language would be best suited to convert an existing VB6 application (with SQL server backend.) I need to update the UI and add more user functionality and reporting capabilities. Initially I was thinking of using WPF and attempting the MVVM model for this big project. Reports would be generated from SSRS.
A peer suggested using ASP.net and I don't have enough experience to determine what would be better. The senior programmers here are stuck on using VB6 and don't have any input on what to use. They are encouraging me to use the latest technologies.
This application would be for ~20 users in a central location. Ideally I would stick to a Microsoft .net language. Current interface is similar to a datagrid table where the user would click in to see the detail of each record. They would need to have multiple records open at any given time.
I look forward to all the advice I can get.
EDIT 2010/04/22 2:47 PM EST
What is your audience? Internal clients within an intranet
How complex are the interactions you expect to implement? not very... displaying data from SQL server to UI. Allow user updates to said data. Typically just one user modifying a record.
Do you require near real-time data updates? no
How often do you expect to update the application after the first release? twice/year
Do you expect a well-defined set of client platforms? Yes, windows xp environment, potentially upgrading to Win7. Currently in IE.6 moving to IE7 or 8 within a couple of months.
Do users need access from anywhere? No, just from their PC.
What would be wrong about building a simple ASP.Net application in VB.Net using Gridviews for allowing the data access and manipulation? Seems like a simple ADO.Net trial application if you aren't familiar with it in the beginning you will be by the end. CRUD applications are pretty common so it shouldn't be too hard to build it and then refine it as more requirements become apparent.
Sounds like you need to use a web-based solution--this eliminates alot of your potential distribution woes with multiple users. You could use silverlight, but if you are locked into SSRS, this might not be the way to go.