Developer Story: Exploring DotVVM Ecosystem

Hi, I’m Tomáš and I’m a .NET Developer at Riganti s.r.o. At the company, I have been working mostly on commercial projects that we build with the DotVVM Framework. I had my first experience with DotVVM when it was still in alpha. Sometimes it was not comfortable at all to use and we have often discussed many things with the DotVVM team to improve usage of the framework. Every iteration of the framework was better than the previous one and we were happy that we could use it more comfortably. At this point in time, we had no documentation as well, but it wasn't a big deal because learning the framework was quite easy and fast.  Nowadays it‘s even easier to learn than before because there is a lot of learning materials like videos, samples and documentation. We have a Github repositories, where we have a few samples, that show you, for example, the DotVVM integration with other technologies or some other examples.  You can always start learning from our interactive DotVVM Academy as well.

The DotVVM framework was designed to be very modular. You can use it with other ASP.NET technologies like Web Forms, Web API and ASP.NET MVC. For example, I often use DotVVM with Web API, because I need some REST endpoints. It is very easy, you just need to register the Web API middleware with routes in the Startup.cs class.  You can also write your own controls (your control class has to inherit from HtmlGenericControl class)  or you can use the existing DotVVM controls, which can be easily overidden if needed. We also have a GitHub repository where you can publish your own controls and we are frequently contributing new controls to it as well. In the last couple of weeks, we have for example implemented controls which wrap the popular CKEditor or GoogleAnalytics controls for easier use with DotVVM. We have also developed a bridge for wrapping React controls.

We are currently experimenting with DotVVM and Electron that would run DotVVM as a desktop application. If you are interested, feel free to contribute to our repository.

Over the years, we have implemented a lot of new controls for different use cases in enterprise projects and we have learnt a lot from every project. We used these past experiences to create our latest product DotVVM Business pack, which is a set of professional controls for most use cases, which typically occur in enterprise web applications. Today, when we build a new project, we have tons of well-made controls to choose from and we can focus our time on whats important, on the customer‘s business side.

Feel free to discuss your questions with us on Gitter or create a Github issue. We will be happy to help you or discuss your own ideas for new controls. Be part of our community.