Employee Info Starter Kit

The Story
Employee Info Starter Kit is an open source project that is highly influenced by the concept ‘Pareto Principle’ or 80-20 rule, where it is targeted to enable a web developer to gain 80% productivity with 20% of effort with respect to learning curve and production.
It is intended to address different types of real world challenges faced by web application developers when performing common CRUD operations. Using a single database table ‘Employee’, it illustrates how to utilize Microsoft ASP.NET 4.0, Entity Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 effectively in that context.

Project Goal
Creating a new employee record
Read existing employee record
Update an existing employee record
Delete existing employee records
User Stories

Project Goal
ASP.NET 4.0
Entity Framework 4.0
T-4 Template
Visual Studio 2010
Key Technology Areas

Project Goal
There is no universal architecture which can be considered as the best for all sorts of applications around the world. Based on requirements, constraints, environment, application architecture can differ from one to another. Trade-off factors are one of the important considerations while deciding a particular architectural solution.
Employee Info Starter Kit is highly influenced by the concept ‘Pareto Principle’ or 80-20 rule, where it is targeted to enable a web developer to gain 80% productivity with 20% of effort with respect to learning curve and production.
“Productivity” as the architectural objective typically also includes other trade-off factors as well as, such as testability, flexibility, performance etc. Fortunately Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 includes lots of great features that have been implemented cleverly in this project to reduce these trade-off factors in the minimum level.
Architectural Objective

Project Goal
Application frameworks are really great for productivity, some of which are really unavoidable in this modern age. However relying too many frameworks may overkill a project, as frameworks are typically designed to serve wide range of different usage and are less customizable or editable. On the other hand having implementation patterns can be useful for developers, as it enables them to adjust application on demand. Employee Info Starter Kit provides hundreds of “connected” snippets and implementation patterns to demonstrate problem solutions in actual production environment. It also includes Visual Studio T-4 templates that generate thousands lines of data access and business logic layer repetitive codes in literally few seconds on the fly, which are fully mock testable due to language support for partial methods and latest support for mock testing in Entity Framework.
Why Employee Info Starter Kit is Not a Framework?

Project Goal
Software development is one of the rapid growing industries around the globe, where the technology is being updated very frequently to adapt greater challenges over time. There are literally thousands of community web sites, blogs and forums that are dedicated to provide support to adapt new technologies. While some are really great to enable learning new technologies quickly, in most cases they are either too “simple and brief” to be used in real world scenarios or too “complex and detailed” which are typically focused to achieve a product goal (such as CMS, e-Commerce etc) from "end user" perspective and have a long duration learning curve with respect to the corresponding technology. Employee Info Starter Kit, as a web project, is basically "developer" oriented which actually considers a hybrid approach as “simple and detailed”, where a simple domain has been considered to intentionally illustrate most of the architectural and implementation challenges faced by web application developers so that anyone can dive into deep into the corresponding new technology or concept quickly.
Why Employee Info Starter Kit is Different than Other Open-source Web Applications?

Project Goal
Since its first release by 2008 in MSDN Code Gallery, Employee Info Starter Kit gained a huge popularity in ASP.NET community and had 1, 50,000+ downloads afterwards. Being encouraged with this great response, we have a strong commitment for the community to provide support for it with respect to latest technologies continuously.
Currently hosted in Codeplex, this community driven project is planned to have a wide range of individual editions, each of which will be focused on a selected application architecture, framework or platform, such as ASP.NET Webform, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, ASP.NET MVC, jQuery Ajax (RIA), Silverlight (RIA), Azure Service Platform (Cloud), Visual Studio Automated Test etc. See here for full list of current and future editions.
Roadmap

Recognitions
Channel 9 Weekly Show
The Official Microsoft ASP.NET Site
Recommended by Bloggers, Forum Members
Scott Guthrie, Scott Haselman, Joe Stagner and few others Twits

Download Matrix

QuickStart Walkthrough (UI)
Start Now

Source Code Review

Future Editions
ASP.NET Webform
ASP.NET MVC
ASP.NET Dynamic Data
ASP.NET Ajax
jQuery Ajax
HTML 5 Basic
HTML 5 Local Storage
Windows Azure
SQL Azure
Silverlight
WCF RIA Service
Entity Framework LINQ
Entity Framework PLINQ
Entity Framework Compiled Query
Entity Framework Entity SQL (eSQL)
Entity Framework with Stored Procedure
WCF Data Service
WCF Operation Contract
Reactive Extension
Cache Service (Single Machine)
Windows AppFabric (Distributed Caching)
Visual Studio Automated Test

The user experience
Let’s talk about

EISK UX: Why is it so cool?
RAD
Faster Development
Faster Integration
Liquidness
Easier Development
Easier Alteration
Compatible
Compatible to all major browsers
EISK’s User Experience was designed to focus on –

EISK UX: The Framework
960 Grid System
Blueprint CSS
CSS3
EISK’s UX is combination of most powerful CSS Frameworks

EISK UX: RAD. Yes, it is!
Basic Layout
Forms
Buttons
ASP.NET Grids
Breadcrumbs/Sitemaps
Rapid UX development

EISK UX: Layout
Your site’s HTML structure was never been so easier!

EISK UX: Forms
A TextBox requires a CssClass=“Text”, and you have the Style!

EISK UX: Buttons
Skins for Buttons have made it easier to integrate. Need more Buttons? Get your buttons by colors Blue/Orange/Green/Gray or size, Small/Medium/Large

EISK UX: Grids
Yes. ASP.NET Grids are cool when you have a Skins with definitive CSS classes like HeaderStyle/FooterStle/PagerStyle...

EISK UX: Grids - Pager
It was really difficult to make the pager look “like a pager” 

EISK UX: Grids - Pager
So we needed to inject a CSS Class called “PagerStyle”. And you see? 

EISK UX: Bread Crumbs
This is how a SiteMap Control used to get rendered before 

EISK UX: Bread Crumbs
Now we’ve got CSS, and you’ve got it the right look!

EISK: Anyone Can do it
We’ve played it hard to make it softer and easier for you!

The Team
Ashraful Alam
Wahid bin Ahsan
Microsoft MVP, ASP.NET [2007-2011]
User Experience Architect, desme Inc.
Chief Architect, desme Inc.
Facebook.com/AshrafulAlam
Facebook.com/WahidbinAhsan
@AshrafulAlam
@WahidbinAhsan
www.Ashraful.Net
www.WahidbinAhsan.com

Get Engaged!
EISK | Employee Info Starter Kit
Get 80 for 20.
ASP.NET Open Source Project
Facebook.com/EISK.NET
EISK.Codeplex.com

Employee Info Starter Kit

by joycsc on Sep 23, 2011

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Employee Info Starter Kit — Presentation Transcript