News

AL Office+ Pack Beta was released!

Now Abstract Desktop works for Microsoft Office! With AL Office+ Pack you can show your user interface in MS Excel, and soon we'll add the support for other MS Office applications (MS Word, MS Outlook, MS Power Point, etc.). When developing standard desktop applications, you were showing your dockable windows and MDI child forms in a desktop application. Now these windows and forms can be rendered in MS Office application, and you don't need to recompile your code.

Overview

AL Platform provides an Add-In framework for rapid development of flexible solutions with a complex user interface. AL Platform introduces the concept of Abstract Desktop, and defines a new development methodology - Tool-Oriented Approach. A tool is an independent software module - Add-In - which can be hosted inside other applications. The idea of abstract desktop allows these tools to utilize the application's workspace and menu without recompiling the tool itself, and without recompiling the application.

AL Platform is not an external program you should use in order to manage your application. AL Platform is a component library which ships as a set of .NET assemblies. If you want to build a reliable and flexible application that consists of a set of reusable modules your choice will be AL Platform!


What a Tool Is

AL Platform gives you a software architecture which allows to integrate modules (Add-Ins) the application is comprised of. We call these Add-Ins tools.

A tool is a software module which solves some business task. In bank trading, a tool can perform some analyzing logic (e.g., make some calculations and show charts). In aircraft, a tool can help a desk assistant to book a ticket for a client.

Normally, a tool can be associated with one or more use cases. Below is an example of an application which is comprised of 3 tools:

• Analyzer which shows a chart and a grid
• Explorer which displays some search results
• Customer tool that allows to view customer details and other customer related information.

Developing Tool

Tools can be developed independently by different teams. They can reside in different assemblies on different machines. AL Platform allows these tools to communicate, and eliminates the communication overhead.

As a developer, in order to introduce a new tool, you create a new class and derive it from Al.Application.Tool or Al.DesktopApplication.DesktopTool. Then you fill some initialization code (add menu items, define tool view, etc.). And the tool is ready for use.

Analyzer tool's code is further.

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