Today is Friday, so I decided to take it easy with my integration research. When I woke up, I decided that I just wanted to read the source code of DevExpress AI integrations to get inspired. I began by reading the official blog post about AI and reporting (DevExpress Blog Post). Then, as usual, I proceeded to fork the repository to make my own modifications.
After completing the typical cloning procedure in Visual Studio, I realized that to use the AI functionalities of XtraReport, you don’t need any special version of the report viewer.
The only requirement is to have the NuGet reference as shown below:
In the evolving panorama of contemporary web application development, a technology that has particularly caught attention is Microsoft’s Blazor WebAssembly. This powerful tool allows for a transformative approach to managing and interacting with client-side data, offering innovative capabilities that are shaping the future of web applications.
Understanding Blazor WebAssembly
Blazor WebAssembly is a client-side web framework from Microsoft. It allows developers to build interactive web applications using C# instead of JavaScript. As the name suggests, it uses WebAssembly, a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine, providing developers with the ability to run client-side web applications directly in the browser using .NET.
The Power of SQLite
SQLite, on the other hand, is a software library that provides a relational database management system (RDBMS). It operates directly on disk files without the need for a separate server process, making it ideal for applications that need local storage. It’s compact, requires zero-configuration, and supports most of the SQL standard, making it an excellent choice for client-side data storage and manipulation.
Combining Blazor WebAssembly with SQLite
By combining these two technologies, you can unlock the full potential of client-side data handling. Here’s how:
Self-Contained and Cross-Platform Development
Both Blazor WebAssembly and SQLite are self-contained systems, requiring no external dependencies. They also both provide excellent cross-platform support. This makes your applications highly portable and reduces the complexity of the development environment.
Offline Availability
SQLite enables the storage of data directly in the client’s browser, allowing your Blazor applications to work offline. Changes made offline can be synced with the server database once the application goes back online, providing a seamless user experience.
Superior Performance
Blazor WebAssembly runs directly in the browser, offering near-native performance. SQLite, being a lightweight yet powerful database, reads and writes directly to ordinary disk files, providing high-speed data access. This combination ensures your application runs quickly and smoothly.
Full .NET Support and Shared Codebase
With Blazor, you can use .NET for both client and server-side code, enabling code sharing and eliminating the need to switch between languages. Coupled with SQLite, developers can use Entity Framework Core to interact with the database, maintaining a consistent, .NET-centric development experience.
Where does the magic happens?
The functionality of SQLite with WebAssembly may vary based on your target framework. If you’re utilizing .NET 6 and Microsoft.Data.SQLite 6, your code will reference SQLitePCLRaw.bundle_e_sqlite3 version 2.0.6. This bundle doesn’t include the native SQLite reference, as demonstrated in the following image
This implies that you’ll need to rely on .NET 6’s native dependencies to include your custom version of lib.e_sqlite3, compiled specifically for WebAssembly. For more detailed information about native dependencies, please refer to the provided links.
If you’re using .NET 7 or later, your reference from Microsoft.Data.SQLite will depend on SQLitePCLRaw.bundle_e_sqlite3 version 2.1.5. This bundle provides several targets for the native SQLite library (e_sqlite3), as can see in the accompanying image.
This indicates that we can utilize SQLite on any platform supported by .NET, provided that we supply the native reference for SQLite.
Conclusion
Blazor WebAssembly and SQLite together offer a compelling option for developers looking to leverage the power of client-side data. Their combination enables the development of web applications with high performance, offline availability, and a unified language platform.
This potent mix empowers developers to rethink what’s possible with web application development, pushing the boundaries of what we can achieve with client-side data storage and manipulation. In a world where user experience is paramount, the coupling of these technologies truly helps in unleashing the full potential of client-side data.
I have been using XPO from DevExpress since day one. For me is the best O.R.M in the dot net world, so when I got the news that XPO was going to be free of charge I was really happy because that means I can use it in every project without adding cost for my customers.
Nowadays all my customer needs some type of mobile development, so I have decided to master the combination of XPO and Xamarin
Now there is a problem when using XPO and Xamarin and that is the network topology, database connections are no designed for WAN networks.
Let’s take MS SQL server as an example, here are the supported communication protocols
TCP/IP.
Named Pipes
To quote what Microsoft web site said about using the protocols above in a WAN network
In a fast-local area network (LAN) environment, Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) Sockets and Named Pipes clients are comparable with regard to performance. However, the performance difference between the TCP/IP Sockets and Named Pipes clients becomes apparent with slower networks, such as across wide area networks (WANs) or dial-up networks. This is because of the different ways the interprocess communication (IPC) mechanisms communicate between peers.”
So, what other options do we have? Well if you are using the full DotNet framework you can use WCF.
So, it looks like WCF is the solution here since is mature and robust communication framework but there is a problem, the implementation of WCF for mono touch (Xamarin iOS) and mono droid (Xamarin Android)
You can read about Xamarin limitations in the following links
I don’t want to go into details about how the limitation of each platform affects XPO and WCF but basically the main limitation is the ability to use reflection and emit new code which is needed to generate the WCF client, also in WCF there are problems in the serialization behaviors.
So basically, what we need to do is to replace the WCF layer with some other technology to communicate to the database server
The technology I’ve selected for this AspNetCore which I would say is a really nice technology that is modern, multi-platform and easy to use. Here below you can see what is the architecture of the solution
AspNetCore
Rest API
So, what we need basically is to be able to communicate the data layer with the data store through a network architecture.
The network architecture that I have chosen is a rest API which is one of the strong fronts of AspNetCore. The rest API will work as the server that forward the communication from XPO to the Database and vice versa, you can find a project template of the server implementation here https://www.jocheojeda.com/download/560/ this implementation references one nuget where I have written the communication code, you can fine the nuget here https://nuget.bitframeworks.com/feeds/main/BIT.Xpo.AgnosticDataStore.Server/19.1.5.1
There are times when you have been working on your new exciting project and it looks so good that you just want to release it as soon as possible so the world can be blessed with your new NuGet package but wait your new library is a complex library and require special setup instructions after it has been installed.
Well, we can solve that problem by adding a readme file with all the setup instructions, to do that add the following XML snippet to your csproj file, then you can just add a ReadMe.txt to your project. Now when the end-user install your NuGet package the read me file will automatically open
When I got the news that XPO will run on DotNetCore, NetStandard and Xamarin I was super excited about all the new possibilities and to be able to port all the years of experience with XPO to the Xamarin platform.
A few days after the announcement of XPO being able to run on DotNetCore and NetStandard developer express publish a video tutorial and the source on GitHub.
As always like in any video tutorial most of the setup steps are not shown, so you need to do a little research to make your personal project work and I would say most of the time these steps are not that obvious.
I decided to test XPO on Xamarin forms and save data on an SQLite database, so as with every Xamarin project the first step is to install all the necessary nuggets for your project. So, to make it easier for myself I check the source code that DevExpres publish and I was surprised about how many references you need to run SQLite on both Android and iOS platforms. If you want to check the complete list of nuget references needed, click on the following links
To set up all the nuggets reference on both platforms took me around 15 minutes which I think it’s a lot, but then I said, “it does not matter, you only have to do this once right”… well no, since I was so excited that XPO is now able to run on Xamarin I started to create a lot of test projects and migrate some old projects too and every time I have to run to the process of install all the nuggets references.
So, to make my life easier I decided to create a NuGet package with all the references for each platform so here they are
