Wow.... how could I missed this. Since last Friday the site was down. After talking with support, it seems that I had some kind of attack, firing up the CPU usage above 20%, that triggered the shutdown of the http service for the website.

Sorry dudes and dudetes for this.

Let me just start by saying that regarding my last post, I was contacted by the OutSystems and a support ticket was open to correct those situations in a future release.

Now, after been working with OutSystems for sometime, I believe that some improvement could be added, like:

Custom Controls

One thing that I think is critical and a major flaw in the OS platform is the lack of support for custom controls. Now a days this is simply mandatory. In the previous client, we had a huge library of custom, business-oriented, controls.

Extended Assign Editor

Another thing that could be introduced is a Extended Assign (Expression) Editor. When using the Assign Action, we can have, for instance, 30 assigns. Editing them in a property grid like editor may not always be the best(practical) solution. It would be nice to have a Extended Expression Editor for action that had multiple arguments. This Extended Expression Editor would have on the left side a treeview with all the arguments of that action.

Unit tests outside assemblies

This was a big "What the Heck" for me. While using Reflector to browser the OutSystems assemblies, I found out that many assemblies also contains the unit tests. Keeping it in one project requires extra bandwidth to distribute , extra build time and increases the installation footprint.

Master Pages

On the community forums there is a post about this topic with over a year. This is a much needed functionality. Please release it on the next version. Pleeeeaaaassseeee. :)

Docking panels

The OS Service Studio relies on panel for both application(eSpace) navigation and Tool box. This is just fine, but these panel are "fixed". Or you see them or you...see them. It would be nice to have docking panel, like visual Studio. 

Editor Tabs

Another feature that could be added to improve user experience are the tabs. The latest release of the Service Studio introduced the navigation back/forward arrow, but is my believe that tabs would be much appreciated by the community.

Split Screen

Now this is just pushing, but split screen for the designer, action of a webscreen would be just soooo sweeeeeeet :) .

Shelves

This is a topic not related with the user experience, but more a programmer experience. Many times while creating a a webscreen, editing a action, or whatever task we can perform on the Service Studio, we have the need to save that change for later. A common scenario is when we are introducing a new, 5 days long feature, and on day 4 your manager says "We need to make a little change on that action." . We can always save the eSpace, get the latest publish one, make the changes and go back to our saved eSpace.

For me it would be nice to have a "Shelve..." on the context menu. This action would save the changes to the OS Server for later usage.

This is a concept that we have, for instance, with Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server.

Conclusion

So, these are some of the features I would love to be added to the OS.

What do you think? Any suggestions?

If you haven't already tried out the OS Platform, download the developer edition, learn how to use, and show it to your manager :) . It's great for rapid application development.

Lately I've been working with the OutSystems platform. For all of you that need to develop small to medium applications on a record time, this is the tool.

Although developed in .Net, the OS platform just recently updated their tools to the 2.0 version of the .NET framework.

"So, what does this introduction has to do with the title?"

What happens is that I developed a HttpModule to add some meta tags to all applications under IIS.

All worked well until we started using one of the OS management applications. The error was: "The Controls collection cannot be modified because the control contains code blocks (i.e. <%...%><% ... %>). "

"What the heck?!"

After browsing thru the OS management application page files, I found this piece of code on almost all pages of the application:

<head runat="server">
<title><%= HttpUtility.HtmlEncode (Title) %></title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<link href="web.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" /><%= GetJavaScriptIncludes() %>
<script src="<%= OutSystems.HubEdition.RuntimePlatform.Web.JavaScriptManager.GetRelativeJavaScriptPrefix() %>_osvalidators.js" type="text/javascript" charset="UTF-8"></script>
</head>

Has you can see, although the head tag as the attribute runat="server" they still use markup text (<%...%>). Has Rick explains, when using the markup text, the generated code for the page changes, and all markup text is translated to Response.write and the controls collection of the container is hardcoded living no room for adding new controls.

So for me, the big question is: Since the OS team updated their solution to the .NET 2.0 version, why didn't they also upgraded the management application to use all the cool (and helpful) features? Why not use MasterPages? Why not use the ClientScript.RegisterClientScriptBlock and this.ClientScript.RegisterClientScriptInclude? Why not use the Page.Title ?

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