Microsoft Guidance for Silky Smooth Web Sites
Recently a new Patterns and Practices group has formed called Project Silk. The goal of Project Silk is to provide guidance to web developers on architecting great standards compliant web sites. Today I am spending the day with the team and about 30 other interested parties going over the application as it stands today. Our goals today are to hash out what is the best way to solve common problems when architecting a modern web application.
So what is Project Silk? Like I said its about providing guidance to build high quality web applications. But I think it is about more. Where most sample applications companies like Microsoft produce its not focusing on a particular product or technology its about how to use the tools and techniques available to compose a web application.
The reference application the team is building is based on a real-worldish scenario where an application allows users to authenticate and track their family’s auto mileage and other auto related costs.
The application uses some of the latest Ajax/jQuery techniques, but they are making an extraordinary effort to use progressive enhancement. Other questions the team is asking involve testing strategies, server-side architecture, User Experience, Caching, Social Sign-In and much more.
As I am sitting here I am very involved in the sessions with questions and feedback. And honestly we are having some great conversations about real-world questions that we all ask. One questions we seem to be asking is do developers really care about this? Personally I do, but if you really do not care about your application’s quality I would have to question your commitment to your profession. But that is another thread.
I encourage you to download the reference Silk application. It is an MVC 3 Razor applications. You may have to tweak it a little, like I do, to get it to compile. There are some requirements that need to be met before you can run it locally. And the download does include a pretty good readme document.