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.NET-A Complete Development Cycle

What is the Purpose of This Book? The purpose of this book is to introduce and explain to the reader the practical application of software development with Microsoft .NET technologies (based on Visual Studio .NET 2003), state of the art tools and good software engineering practices on the example of a real life project. During the course of this book an entire project life cycle of an Online Photoshop project is shown. The reader, as part of the project team, is integrated into the development team and is required to contribute to the success of the project with his/her own task assignments. The project starts with a basic application and through moving forward to new iterations of the project, the difficulty of the addressed requirements gradually increases, starting with the design of simple forms and advancing to implementation of multithreaded algorithms and the development of the capability to upload pictures to order prints or customized merchandise. The entire product development cycle including wrap up, maintenance strategies and best practices for the Online Photoshop project is discussed. Therefore each chapter starts with an explanation of the theory necessary to complete the specific development iteration corresponding to that chapter. Readers just interested in either the software engineering or the programming related sections will find the icons useful that indicate the beginning of each programming and software engineering related sections throughout the book. The explanation of the theory at the beginning of each chapter enables us to show the reader the connection between the theoretical knowledge of .NET software development and its practical application within a real life project. This practical application of the theory is reiterated piecewise throughout the book. The successful completion of the reader-assigned tasks can be verified by checking the readers' implementation against the sample solution of each chapter that is provided on the CD ROM. In addition, the extensive references sections provided at the end of each chapter will be a valuable help for readers that would liked to further explore topics of particular interest. Who Is This Book For? Because of its unique combination of software engineering theory and its practical application within a real life project, .NET-;A Complete Development Cycle is valuable and targeted towards readers of the following areas: Software Engineers Students of Computer Science or related fields Team Leads, Project Leads and Project Managers Software Quality and Software Process Engineers All readers within the target audience will profit from this book in many different ways. The greatest benefits will be experienced by readers of the target audience that are new to Microsoft .NET technology and/or readers that are interested in the theory and practical application of the Software Engineering Process within a real project, including the use of best practices. The practical approach of this book enables readers to learn the theory upfront and then apply the gained knowledge immediately within the same chapter to the sample project. In case the reader wants to further explore some specific subject, he or she can do that by simply using the provided references as a starting point. Although no knowledge of a particular programming language is required to work with this book, a basic understanding of object-oriented programming as well as some programming experience will be helpful for readers that intend to follow the implementation sections of the Online Photoshop. How Is This Book Structured? This book is structured like a real life project. The entire lifecycle of the Online Photo Shop is shown during the course of this book. Because of this structure each chapter of the book corresponds to an Iteration of the Unified Process (except chapters 1 and 2, which introduce the theory necessary to get the project started) which is the software development process of choice for this project. We differentiate between the software engineering sections (which are more theoretical) and the programming sections with unique icons. Although it is recommended to read through all sections of the book, this structure enables readers just interested in either the Software Engineering or the Programming parts to skip over the sections that are not of interest. Furthermore in the beginning of each chapter the current phase and iteration of the project within the Unified Process is shown to the reader. Within each chapter an icon indicates to the reader at which point a certain workflow within the project starts. This structure enables the reader to exactly determine on which phase, what iteration and which workflow the project is worked on at any time during the course of the project. In addition it should be mentioned that, for the convenience of the reader, the sample solution for each chapter is provided on the CD that is coming with this book. What Is Covered in This Book? Throughout the course of this book the reader faces the challenges of a real software project. These are analyzed, solutions for them are developed, implemented and tested using the Unified Process, state of the art tools and best practices. While proceeding through the development of the project a wide variety of .NET technologies, software engineering practices and state of the art tools are introduced and applied. The reader, as an integrated part of the development team, needs to contribute to the success of the project by delivering the given assignments. The required theoretical foundations are introduced before their first application and are explained whenever their usage becomes necessary, making it easy to grow into more complex requirements. The majority of the application developed involves image processing, leading to immediately visible results. The developed application is intended to be a starting point for further exploring the possibilities of .NET application development. In the following an outline of the content for each chapter is given: Chapter 1: Introducing .NET Technology The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the features that are provided within Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003. Therefore, a short introduction to .NET and the main features of the .NET runtime and framework class library are explained. Chapter 2: The Theory of Software Engineering This chapter serves as the actual starting point of the project that will outline and explain common Software Engineering practices. In addition the basics of "good" Software Engineering practices will be explained. Chapter 3: Prototype in .NET The goal of the prototype is to develop a very simple application program to show the feasibility of building an application using .NET technology. It introduces the Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment, its application wizard, the new programming language C# and the use of Windows forms. Chapter 4: Project Planning The main focus in this chapter is on capturing and analyzing requirements. Also the methodologies and practices used during the project like UML use case diagrams, coding standards, test framework, configuration management and development cycle are introduced. Furthermore XML document generation and the use of XSL stylesheets are explained in order to generate some of the project documentation automatically. Chapter 5: The Photo Editor Application Like all the remaining chapters this chapter starts with the Requirements refinement and continues with the analysis of the requirements before the design is specified. Before implementation is started the detailed project schedule is discussed. Following that the implementation of a smart client Windows application, as the first component of the Online Photo Shop, is developed. Within the chapter the architectural baseline for this component is implemented, which covers loading, saving and displaying digital pictures, some basic imaging operations like rotation and, last but not least, error handling. Chapter 6: Graphics with GDI+ After the Requirements Analysis and Design are finished, one of the project team members is leaving the project. Therefore strategies on how the project can recover are described. The Photo Editor is then extended by adding drawing and text features to it. The functionality is implemented using GDI+ , which is part of the .NET framework class library. Also the handling of user inputs like mouse events is demonstrated. Chapter 7: Advanced Graphics Operations This chapter continues Chapter 6 and starts with the requirements analysis and the design of the new features. It is then shown how to keep the project on track when customers decide to change or add requirements during project development. In addition this chapter explains advanced features of GDI+ like graded brushes, transparent bitmaps and different fill styles to modify the images with more sophisticated graphic overlays. Chapter 8: Dynamic Loading of Components In this iteration of the project it is shown how the visibility of the project status can be increased. This is very important to allow all project team members to stay focused and to identify potential problems as early as possible. Furthermore an extensibility concept for the Photo Editor using plug-ins is implemented. A set of plug-ins for different image processing operations is developed using different .NET programming languages (VB, C++, J# and C#). Chapter 9: Accessing System Resources An important feature of .NET is the possible integration of unmanaged code. The need for this exists when legacy code needs to be integrated into new products or managed code cannot match the required performance. Another example is the need to gain access to system resources and hardware not exposed through the framework class library. This chapter demonstrates a sol ISBN: 0321168828