I've now gotten permission to use XUL for another client, and this time around, I'm trying it a little differently.

Rather than serving up a .xul file, and doing everything with overlays, DOM manipulation, and XBL, I'm serving up a .aspx file, setting its content-type to application/vnd.mozilla.xul+xml, and then using ASP.NET to render XUL instead of HTML. Jeb (do you have a link, Jeb?) said he was creating XUL apps this way using JSP, so I figured I'd give it a try. So far I like it. This method lets me lean on my ASP.NET skills while I build up the XUL skills.

How I have it set up:

• One .aspx page per XUL layout, using <html:a> tags to navigate between them.
• One ASP.NET user control is on each page, ensuring all XUL layouts have the same template and include the same javascript and css files. I had tried do this with overlays, but didn't have much luck.
• A few IHttpHandlers to send RDF to my XUL, and JSON to my javascript.
• A few webservices that get called by my javascript, and the work is done in C#.

For now, I'm only using this on applications that require windows authentication to access the site, so to access the web services you'll need to be logged in. Security is still a concern, though, and eventually I'll have to expose some of these web services to wild. I've been considering some token system where the server passes a token to the client when it renders the xul aspx page, and then the javascript passes that token to the web services, but I haven't fleshed anything out yet.

I'm pretty confident no one but me uses the taskpool app, but just in case, I just made a pretty major update. In the last version, the tasks would get serialized to disk (in rdf:local-store) when you closed the program. Seeing as I leave my workstation on all the time, I rarely had the need to close the program.

Today windows decided I had done one "ctrl-shift-b" too many and spontaneously rebooted, losing all the tasks I had built up over the previous weeks of stability. I spent some time tonight refactoring the code and making things save automagically, so now not even killing the xulrunner process loses my precious, precious data. I also found some bugs where the rdf was getting corrupted, so that is fixed as well.

Downloads:

• taskPoolBundled.zip (5685 KB)
  To run, unzip the file whereever you want, and run the "taskPool.bat".
• taskPool.zip (55 KB)
  To run, unzip the file whereever you want, and run the "taskPool.bat". You must have downloaded XulRunner, and have xulrunner.exe in your path.