Mobilize Blog

Usually when we modernize legacy VB6, Delphi or PowerBuilder apps some parts of the migrated application depend on using a device which is attached to the client using the app.

Today we're all pretty excited that Syncfusion has announced support for WebMAP, which means if you have Windows Forms apps using their controls you can now easily map them to the web versions when you migrate the entire app to ASP.NET Core and Angular 6.

In our last blog post, we looked at how to change the styling of individual elements in our migrated Angular application. Just a reminder in case you haven't been following along, this is a simple hello world app migrated from Windows Forms to HTML and ASP.NET Core with WebMAP5.

Find the selector, edit the css file, and rebuild it. You can change the global styles.css file or individual css files for each component.

Or, as we will show in this post, you can change the whole kit and caboodle.

Progress Kendo UI has a full set of web components for Angular. And it happens to be our reference implementation for WebMAP. 

Kendo UI has three themes that are available: the default theme, which is what we implemented, a Bootstrap theme, and a material theme. Today we'll take our little hello world app and switch it to the hyper-cool material theme.

To set the stage, here's what our hello world app looks like using the default Kendo theme (which is the WebMAP default):

It's not bad, but there's room for improvement. Let's get busy.

Installing the Kendo UI material theme

Th is is easy-peasy. Open up the angular folder in Visual Studio Code, get a terminal, and install using NPM:

npm install --save @progress/kendo-theme-material

Once the theme has been installed, you can verify it by looking in node_modules\@progress\kendo-theme-material\dist where you should find the all.css file, a minified version of the styling for the theme. If you want to see what the theme does, the Kendo UI documentation has great examples.

Ok, all we have to do now is include the theme in our app and rebuild it. 

In our .angular-cli.json file we need to change the styles from kendo-theme-default to kendo-theme-material, like so:

All that remains is to execute an ng build command in the terminal and the front end code will be changed to the new theme. 

Here's our app running in material theme:

Themes are a great way to jumpstart a complete re-do of the look and feel of an app. And, of course, you can always go into the global styles or individual component styles to override something you want to change. We covered that recently. And of course, having done this for our "hello world" applet, I wanted to try it on our more red-blooded demo app--Salmon King Seafood. Here's a quick screen shot of the opening form with the material theme applied:

I had to tweak some styles a bit because not all the fonts looked great. Somehow we lost our background color, but that would also be an easy fix. We do get the coolness of the 3D buttons and form fields, so this is a nice upgrade. It's also a nice reminder of how easy it is to upgrade the look and feel of an app once it's correctly architected for the web.

We recently updated our WebMAP architecture posts to reflect the significant improvements that WebMAP5 makes in generated app code (compared to previous versions). If you haven't seen them, this is a good time to check out the details here, here, and here.

Before we jump into the last installment, let's briefly review what we leaned in part 1 and part 2. If you're just jumping into this here, you probably want to go back to the beginning and read from there.

When I first joined Mobilize.Net--actually before I joined Mobilize.Net, since I was interviewing for the job--and I heard the business model was tools to do code conversion,

Here's a cool idea: take your old desktop ERP system and migrate it to the web.

(With apologies to the Muppets--I mean Charles Dickens).

DevOps is a pretty hot topic today, and if you feel like maybe everyone but you is doing it and you're not even sure what "it" is, this is your blog.