Creating First LiveUI application.

To start developing LiveUI based applicartion extract LiveUI.zip archive and run Visual Studio Templates/install.bat

This installer will copy LiveUI project template to your Visual Studio project templates directory. For example at C:\Users\ilyin\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Templates\ProjectTemplates\Visual C#\. By the way, installer can fail if this directory does not exist.

Now let's run Visual Studio and create new LiveUI application.

And we get project like this

Set ExtFormsPage.aspx as startup page and run application.

So first application works itself; we do not have to implement something, but we have to understand what's going on to implement something ourselves. Let's take a look at ExtFormsPage.cs

public partial class ExtFormsPage : Page

{

protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e)

{

var rootComponent = new ExtFormsRootComponent { Page = this, Workspace = Page.Form };

var form = new Form();

var message = new TextField { Label = "Message" };

form.Fields.Add(message);

var buttons = new OkCancelButtonSet();

form.Footer = buttons;

buttons.OkClick += delegate { message.Value = "Hello world"; };

rootComponent.Children.Add(form);

rootComponent.Initialize();

}

This code creates application model for our form; i.e. It builds component tree looking like this

When root component initializes

rootComponent.Initialize();

LiveUI finds View for each component.

Views are responisble for building controls and Html/JavaScript rendering. Key moment there is that components know nothing about presentation and even different Views can be created for the same application model.

One might ask is there are several Views for the same Component how LiveUI makes decision which one to instantiate? Answer is It looks at Root component. For example, if Root component is ExtRoot then only Ext based Views will be created (see contracts for details).