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On the 23th of June we have published a simple techdemo that we did using beWeeVee, a co-operation technology that we are developing. This techdemo is a very simple text editor and was coded with off-the-shelf Silverlight/.Net components by one developer in a month and a half, both client and server.

The objective of the exercise was to allow us to test how difficult is to wire co-operative behaviors into standard user controls using standard web services, and to create a foundational reference code that we can distribute in an upcoming Developer Tech Preview.

The techdemo is hosted on a very small virtualized server (Windows Server 2008 with 512 Mb of memory) to measure how it scale in constrained environments. We have several known issues, but we wanted to let it loose as fast as possible to be able to get real usage feedback.

The design decision guideline was simple, “do it with off-the-shelf enterprise wide supported technology” (no clever coding allowed) and the results where pretty encouraging. That allowed us to measure the impact on common practices and the limitations and extra components we should be releasing.

Known Issues

- We used Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) for the Server and the Client. Silverlight 2 do not support TCP through WCF (something that is available in the current Silverlight 3 Beta) so the user may notice the polling that the client does to retrieve events. Following our Guideline of no clever coding, we said ‘no’ to code using TCP native sockets interface on Silverlight 2.

- The user may notice that when lots of information gets send (after a paste for example) the other end may notice some slowdown. That is caused by how the insertion operations are performed in the component. Following the Guideline we didn’t separate the shared state from the control; we allowed the control to handle the state by itself.

- You probably will notice that when you add lots of users on a session, it will slowdown.

- When you press enter in certain situations because of a known bug we understand that the entire paragraph has been deleted and added again. In most situations this shouldn’t be a problem, but when you couple it with the performance issue for not separating the shared state it gets pretty annoying. Just press F5 to refresh and you will be fine.

- The cursor is moved when you receive something on the cursor position, allowing “cursor wars” between users

- The server is preeeeetty small, so if we get too many hits we can guarantee it will fail because of lack of resources

You can try out beWeeVee at www.beWeeVee.com

Please, let us know what do you think about beWeeVee. You can do it through the feedback form in the application or you can do it also by e-mail to info@corvalius.com

Corvalius, Technology beweevee, co-operative, demo, silverlight 2, wcf