Tag Archives: Silverlight

Don’t miss the Designer Dinner next week

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Based on the success of our Developer Dinner series for US Public Sector Partners, James has been delivering Designer Dinners focusing on the design side of software development.  James is the User Experience Evangelist on our team.  He has a Designer Dinner scheduled for next week on Silverlight and WPF animation 101.  The event is next Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 from 6-8pm EST. 

James and I have been delivering the Developer and Designer Dinners independently so far, but we are working on having more synergy between the topics and schedules moving forward.  You will definitely want to check out his Designer Dinner if you attended the Developer Dinner.  James plans on using the application I built as a starting point. 

You can find details for the event at:

http://blogs.msdn.com/jameschi/archive/2008/12/28/designer-dinner-animation-101.aspx

FOLLOW UP: Developer Dinner on Silverlight Business Applications

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Thanks to everyone who attended!  I want to thank Pete Brown for co presenting with me.

There were quite a few comments about the facility we used not being conducive to hosting the dinner.  I appreciate your honest feedback.  I will definitely do my best to prevent the situation from happening again.  The good news is that we’ll be back at the Microsoft Reston office for February.

You can download the deck and code here:

http://cid-1f72da7294089597.skydrive.live.com/embedrow.aspx/Public/Silverlight%202/Business%20Apps

Don’t forget to check out the Silverlight Toolkit which gives you “a collection of Silverlight controls, components and utilities made available outside the normal Silverlight release cycle. It adds new functionality quickly for designers and developers, and provides the community an efficient way to help shape product development by contributing ideas and bug reports. It includes full source code, unit tests, samples and documentation for 12 new controls covering charting, styling, layout, and user input.”

DEVELOPER DINNER: Building Business-Focused Applications Using Silverlight 2 and Beyond

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IMPORTANT NOTE: This developer dinner will not be at a Microsoft facility.  Please make sure you take note of this.

Thursday, January 15, 2009 6:00 PM – Thursday, January 15, 2009 8:00 PM Eastern Time (US & Canada)
Welcome Time: 5:30 PM

Reston Community Center – Lake Anne

1609-A Washington Plaza
Jo Anne Rose Gallery Reston Virginia 20190
United States

Background:

Business-focused applications, sometimes referred to as Line Of Business (LOB) applications, are almost universally about working with data in some shape or form.  At it’s a heart, a business app needs:

  • A way to move data between tiers
  • A way to shape data (sort, filter, etc.)
  • A way to bind & display data
  • A way to soundly apply business logic

What you will learn:

In this session, we’ll start off by discussing approaches to building this kind of functionality TODAY using Silverlight 2.  Next, we will give you a peek into how a future version of Silverlight will make building these applications even easier.  You will learn about an exciting new technology that is all about making business applications for RIA (Rich Internet Applications) much easier to build.  You will hear how we’ve made n-tier application development as simple as traditional 2-tier, provided application level solutions to developers, and how we’re doing all of this with the same .NET platform and tools on both the client and server.

Who should come:

This is an opportunity to learn techniques to build apps today and get ahead of the curve before the next version of Silverlight is released.  If you are someone that builds, architects, or manages development teams building Web Applications, this presentation is for you.

Register Here

Target Silverlight and WPF using a common codebase

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How do I build an application that targets both WPF and Silverlight?

This question comes up quite a bit as I talk to people about both WPF and Silverlight.  Whenever I am asked this question, I always respond by letting people know that v2 of the patterns & practices Composite Application Guidance for WPF (code name PRISM) is adding support for Silverlight 2.  Although, the overall purpose of the guidance is about building composite applications, v2 also has solid guidance on how to multi-target WPF & Silverlight using shared code where possible.  If you are interested in this scenario, then I would recommend downloading the latest drop and reading through the guidance.  You can follow the project from the codeplex site:

http://www.codeplex.com/CompositeWPF

As of this post, the most recent drop (7) is here:

http://www.codeplex.com/CompositeWPF/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=20206

You don’t have to download all the bits since the help file is available standalone.  If you want to go straight to the multi-targeting topics, then I recommend reading things in the following order:

Silverlight versus WPF

Multi-Targeting Design Concept

Mutli-Targeting Technical Concept

Project Linker: Synchronization Tool

Mutli-Targeting QuickStart

MUST HAVE: XAML Power Toys

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Depending on how many blogs you read, you’ll be seeing a barrage of “Silverlight 2 released” posts today.  If you haven’t seen it already, make sure you check Scott Guthrie’s post about the release at http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/10/14/silverlight-2-released.aspx. 

Karl Shifflet just updated his XAML Power Toys to support the Silverlight 2 release.  If you are doing any WPF or Silverlight development, then I HIGHLY RECOMMEND downloading the power toys.  They greatly enhance the developer experience inside of Visual Studio.  Here’s the first paragraph from Karl’s page:

“XAML Power Toys is a Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Multi-AppDomain Add-In that empowers WPF & Silverlight developers while working in the XAML editor.  Its Line of Business form generation tools, Grid tools,  DataGrid and ListView generation really shorten the XAML page layout time.”

Virtual Earth Wrapper for Silverlight (VIEWS)

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At MIX 08, Chris Pendleton announced that the Virtual Earth team is working on a Silverlight 2 control.  The idea of being able to use managed code instead of JavaScript to build your Virtual Earth applications is very appealing to many.  I know many people are eagerly awaiting the Silverlight 2 control from the Virtual Earth team.  No, I don’t have any news on when that control will be out, but I do have some good news.  There is an interim solution for those of you dying to write some managed code in the browser instead of JavaScript.  Adam Eversole, from Microsoft Research, built VIEWS precisely for this scenario.  VIEWS was originally a internal-only project at Microsoft.  When Adam shared his work, he immediately received a number of requests to make it public.  I am happy to report that Adam was gracious enough to share the love!  I worked with Adam, John Pelak, and Jared Bienz to get this out to the world.  The real credit goes to Jared though.  He did all the work of getting VIEWS ready for public consumption.  So what are you waiting for?  Hop on over to http://www.codeplex.com/views to get your hands on VIEWS.  Jared also recorded a Channel 9 screencast at https://channel9.msdn.com/posts/jbienz/Virtual-Earth-Mapping-in-Silverlight-with-VIEWS/ that gives you a quick intro.

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FOLLOW UP: RIA Dinner (Reston, VA)

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Thanks to everyone who attended the RIA dinner on June 17th.  I promised to publish the deck and code James used as well as some follow up links.  Here they are:

Presentation – deck, code

Expression on microsoft.com – http://www.microsoft.com/expression/

Expression Community Site – http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx (lots of great resources on the "learn" tab)

Expression Design Forum – http://forums.expression.microsoft.com/en-US/design/threads/

Expression Blend Forum – http://forums.expression.microsoft.com/en-US/blend/threads/

Expression Blog – http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/

nibbles: snack tutorials for hungry designers – http://www.nibblestutorials.net/

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FOLLOW UP: Public Sector Developer Conference (Nashville, TN)

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Thanks to everyone who attended.  Sorry about the overflow into the hallways.  There was much less dropoff between registration and attendance than we normally see.  Some of the content isn’t published yet.  Once it is, we’ll make sure to update this post with the appropriate links.

Building Rich Internet Applications Using Microsoft Silverlight 2

Building WPF Applications in Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend – deck, code

Data Access with Language Integrated Query

Overview of the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 & ASP.NET MVC – deck, code

We also mentioned some downloadable tools that folks were interested in using.  Here are the ones I remember:

Visual LINQ (to SQL) Query Builder

LINQPad

If I forgot one, please let me know by posting a comment and I will update the post.  Thanks!

–Marc

WEBCAST FOLLOW UP: Overview of the Microsoft ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview

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Thanks to everyone who attended!  Sorry about the demo hiccups / going over.  As I mentioned in the beginning, I had a hard time trying to get everything I wanted to cover into 90 minutes.  As you can see, there’s quite a bit in the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions.  Normally, I make all of my code demos available for download.  However, I used a newer build for my demos that’s not publicly available.  Once we release the new bits, I will make my code available.  For now, you can download my ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions deck here.

UPDATE: I just created a list of links on my Windows Live Space called ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions.  This list has links to all the relevant landing pages & forums for the various technologies covered today.  Newer versions of MVC, Dynamic Data, and the Silverlight Controls have been released since the December 2007 release of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extension Preview.  Make sure you read the release notes of each newer package to understand how to get the newer bits working on top of the December 2007 preview.  The ADO.NET Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services in the December 2007 release of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extension Preview are the latest releases as of today (04/30/2008).  Stay tuned for a newer release that will reflect the updates you saw today.