Silverlight 3 with RIA.NET Domain Services

 

Brad Abrams Series on SL3/RIA.NET Services

Brad Abrams has a great series of blog posts on using Silverlight 3 with RIA.NET Domain Services.  These posts highlight some of the great new features added to Silverlight 3.

Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 1: Navigation Basics
Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 2: Rich Data Query
Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 3: Authentication
Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 4: SEO, Export to Excel and Out of Browser
Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 5: Astoria, Add Service Reference and WinForms
Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 6: Data Transfer Objects (DTOs)
Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 7: ADO.NET Data Services Based Data Store
Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 8: WCF Based Data Source
Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 9: POCO and Authentication Provider
Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 10: LinqToSql

Silverlight 3 & RIA.NET Domain Services

Data Driven Apps with Silverlight 3 and RIA.NET Services
Unit Testing Business Logic in RIA.NET Services
.NET RIA Services: Get your metadata from anywhere!  – metadata vs. attributes for validation

David Poll on Activity and Navigation

David has a couple of great posts to read – I especially like the ability to load dynamic assemblies from navigation:

Silverlight 3 Navigation: Navigating to Pages in dynamically-loaded assemblies
Silverlight 3 Navigation: Navigating to Pages in referenced assemblies
Update: Displaying background activity in a Silverlight RIA application

SL2 and SL3 on same machine

Just wanted to bump Shawn Wildermuth’s post on the subject:

http://wildermuth.com/2009/04/06/Running_Silverlight_2_and_3_On_Same_Machine_-_Redux!

Thanks Shawn!

Nikhil Kothari on .NET RIA Services

Nikhil gave a talk yesterday at Mix 09 and is sharing his slides, code, etc… read more on his blog here. 

.NET RIA Services builds on Silverlight 3 on the client and ASP.NET on the server to simplify building n-Tier data-driven applications. First, .NET RIA Services provides a prescriptive CRUD-based pattern for authoring your application/domain/business logic, i.e. queries, operations, rules for authorization, validation etc. on the middle tier and makes that functionality easily consumable from your presentation tier in the form of bindable data. Second, on the presentation tier, we’re providing new data controls such as a DataSource, enhanced DataGrid and DataForm/DataPager controls for mainline data/LOB scenarios. Third, we’re also providing higher level building blocks such as authentication, cross-tier user state and the like.

There is no doubt in my mind as I watch/listen to Nikhil in his video that the goal and vision of RIA Services is spot on.

Update : my favorite slides in his deck :

The ‘prescriptive’ pattern…

…which flows into the bigger picture:

(note: these are Nikhil’s images not mine!!!!)

Thanks Nikhil, this is fantastic stuff!

Brad Abrams on Building Bus Apps with Silverlight 3

Brad really dives in on this one – as it is the details, etc… from his talk at Mix 09 “Mix09: Building Amazing Business Applications with Silverlight 3”

This presentation/code, etc… shows off Navigation, RIA.NET Services, validation, offline capability, authentication, data query, data paging, data forms, etc… alot covered – its a good post!

New DataForm for Silverlight 3

This is a great video by Mike Taulty

http://silverlight.net/learn/learnvideo.aspx?video=187317

This new DataForm is a very powerful new form builder for Silverlight 3.  I like the ability to either annotate the class with the details or using XAML directly. 

Check it out – keep in mind, it looks very ‘plain vanilla’ but with the ability to modify it to your hearts desire I’m sure we’ll see some amazing rich forms with Silverlight 3.

Cool!

Check out the other videos on Silverlight 3 while your over at silverlight.net… Tim Heuer has a good one on navigation as well !

Side note:I personally would appreciate the videos done in a MVVM format  

Silverlight – Commands/Attached Behaviors… The Magic

So… wanting to use MVVM in Silverlight but missing Commands?

Check out Julian Dominguez’s blog post on ‘ICommand for Silverlight with Attached Behaviors’

My current fav Silverlight library author Nikhil also has a good blog post on ‘Silverlight Behaviors’  (he uses this extensively in SilverlightFX allow for behaviors and triggers to be wired up to just about any control – great stuff!)

These posts helped me understand a bit of the magic behind the curtains!

(Update, there are a ton of good articles on this, but Radenko Zec’s blog has a good post on using SLExtensions with MVVM , explaining some of this works as well)

Brad Abrams – Silverlight 3.0 for Great Business Apps

Get a glimpse of some Silverlight 3.0 with this video on Channel 9

I’m heavily focused right now on LOB apps so this is good to see!

(Actually I’m doing some work on a form that was heavily dependent on ajax, etc… and looking at re-implementing it in Silverlight to provide a better user experience.)

Silverlight + WCF Duplex Polling

After reading a good article at Dimebrain called ‘Managing Social Data in Silverlight: do you push or pull’, it inspired me to work through the two articles on Silverlight/WCF Duplex Polling:

“How To Build a Duplex Service”:

This topic describes how to create a duplex Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service that can communicate with a Silverlight client. A duplex service maintains a callback channel to the Silverlight client, which allows the service to make calls to the client at any given time. Duplex services have numerous applications including, for example, a chat server for instant messaging or a monitoring service that sends notifications to the client.

In duplex messaging, both service and client expose service contracts, which specify the operations that each of them exposes. In this example, we use the following pair of service contracts.

 

“How To Access a Duplex Service with the Channel Model”:

The procedure outlined here describes how to construct a Silverlight 2 client that sends an order to a duplex service and that is called back by that service twice, first when the service starts to process the order, and second when the order is completed.

Building a Silverlight duplex client involves a significant number of asynchronous calls, where callback methods are defined. The structure used for these asynchronous calls is standard. In the following procedure, some callbacks are omitted for clarity. The full source code, which contains all necessary methods, is available at the end of the procedure.

These two articles go hand in hand.

Silverlight.FX

Silverlight.FX is a fantastic library by Microsoft’s Nikhil Kothari.  He has plenty of samples in the download of different uses.

A small and lean framework that facilitates more structured and more declarative app development (eg. separation of view/code, effects, behaviors etc.) using Silverlight.

Silverlight.FX is more than ‘just FX’, at the same time, it reminds of what you get from a library such as jQuery.  Read more about Silverlight.FX

Download the code, try out the samples, etc… Great stuff!

Silverlight with Google Gears

A combination of Silverlight with Google Gears?

http://nerddawg.blogspot.com/2007/06/google-gears-and-silverlight.html

In the comments he responds about the benefits, etc…

… simply put, the Silverlight isolated storage provides the analogous of straight file I/O. You can squirrel away data and retrieve it later. Gears does the same thing conceptually but it provides a backing database (SQLLite) as persistence store and the benefits of a query language like SQL for data retrieval, filtering and transformation.

Interesting to see, basically giving Silverlight ‘offline’ capability outside of the Isolated storage.   (I’m not sure the size limitations for Gears).