Developer Stories: Introduction

Hello, 

my name is Dobroslav and I would like to welcome you to one of our first developer stories. We will be releasing these blog posts in coming weeks and months and we will focus on some of our developer's insights and their experience with DotVVM Business Pack and DotVVM framework. We want to give you the insight into the development process of our products and tell you a bit about our experience using it in our own enterprise projects for the last couple of months. Personally, I worked on the Business Pack project from the beginning, at first as project manager and later as the marketeer. 

The first idea to create DotVVM was about helping us to speed up the process of building web applications, to eliminate the need to use other external libraries and to avoid writing tons of uninteresting JavaScript code. We have successfully implemented the first iteration of the framework and later, during our internal DotVVM testing on enterprise projects, we have found out that incorporating new team members into to these projects proved easier as well. 

But over time, we have also quickly realized that there are still a lot of ways how to improve our framework. We have created DotVVM for Visual Studio, the extension for our favourite IDE with IntelliSense, and Bootstrap for DotVVM, a set of wrappers over Bootstrap components. But even after creating these new tools, we've been still using some external JavaScript libraries for more complicated components. A good example is DateTimePicker. 

In first iterations of the Bootstrap for DotVVM, we have been using an external library for DateTimePicker control, later we had to switch to another one, and finally, we have come with our own implementation. And of course, there have been other more complicated components, especially in larger enterprise applications we were building. So we thought that although modifying external components or creating new controls is fairly easy to implement in the DotVVM, maybe it would be great to have our own set of professional enterprise controls that would save more time. 

That's why we have created DotVVM Business Pack. We took inspiration from all the various components we either created on our own or modified from external sources to work with the DotVVM and redesigned them. We have learnt from previous design mistakes of the components and we believe that we've achieved a new level of comfortability in terms of the usage and new level of control and customization you have over the components. There are many popular controls included in the DotVVM Business Pack: GridView, DateTimePicker, AutoComplete, MultiSelect, FileUpload, ImageCrop, Slider and much more.  

Furthermore, we have created a powerful Theme Editor. Styling the Business Pack controls is very easy, but with this tool, you basically don’t have to know anything about styling or CSS to edit any specific Business Pack component as you want. We have also prepared ready-made Business Pack themes in various color variants. All for free. 

I think that DotVVM is a great framework, but what makes it even better is the Business Pack. This is especially true if you are looking for a complex solution to web development. We use DotVVM on our own enterprise projects and together with the Business Pack and it's Theme Editor we have pretty much everything we need. Our goal is to deliver the best development tools available on the market and we are always playing with new ideas. Thank you for your support and I hope you will like Business Pack as much as we do. 

If you have any questions please feel free to contact me at [email protected], I would be happy to help.