Pruning through the old Google Reader starred items list was supposed to only take me an hour or so Saturday morning. But sandwiched between some other diversions, it ended up taking me the whole weekend. One of the last things I read was
Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: the Ars Technica review (that was an hour right there all by itself). Flipped through some of the old Mac OS X articles, particularly those right at the turn of the Classic Mac OS transition almost ten years ago. You remember Classic Mac OS, right? With Cyberdog and OpenDoc? Windows users will remember the ideas more as OLE and its foundation COM, and a generation of applications where the screen jumped to and fro whenever you clicked somewhere you weren’t supposed to as menubars popped up and disappeared. And of course, there was J2EE .
Maybe these technologies suffered from being too ambitious or too undefined in scope, but for whatever reason, they’ve been consigned to the dustbin of history. But the dream of having arbitrary components that could just be snapped together like building blocks never seems to die, and maybe we’re finally reaching the point in technology’s history where that could be a possibility. OLE, OpenDoc, and J2EE all assumed those building blocks were gigantic—plug six or seven them together and boom, you’ve got an app—whereas realistically, they’re probably much closer to LEGO®-sized. You’ll need a lot of them before you get something that makes sense—and consequently, you need a little bit of computer know-how.
Fellow Lab49er Charlie Robbins blogged a few weeks ago about a few
sample Silverlight projects that added physics-based behaviors to a canvas with a few items in it. It’s downright silly what you can do with behaviors now, and I wonder if we’re not too far off from seeing a scaled-down version of the component dream realized. It always seemed like overkill to have an IntegerTextBox, or a DateTextBox. But an IntegerBehavior/DateBehavior that can be applied to a TextBox, or a grid cell? Or a behavior that could be applied to a Label to make it an editable TextBox upon a double-click? Or better yet, two behaviors, one to make a label editable on a double-click, and another to restrict to date entry? Much more awesome…
If you haven’t read up on attached behaviors yet, you should. I would argue that a proper MVVM design necessitates attached behaviors—they’re everything that doesn’t belong in the viewmodel layer, but since your views should be stupid and codeless, your “enforce integerness” behavior has to end up somewhere. With viewmodels and attached behaviors, you might never need to write another line of code-behind ever again. —DKT