I was asked to present on RIA Services with Silverlight for the FUNdamentals session of the East Bay .NET User Group last week. Even though I only had 30 minutes to present on the topic, I decided to show the full development of a CRUD application. With RIA Services this is a straight forward thing to do and still allowed time to explain the concepts in use. The solution found here is the code that was built during the demonstration at the user group. It shows the use of Entity Framework to connect...
I am a keen believer when building applications in having a clean logical architecture with separation of concerns as much as possible – taking into account the goals of the project and the environment in which the application will be maintained. As such, when it makes sense I believe in use of MVC, MVP, MVVM etc type patterns to enable efficient development and maintenance of applications. I can testify to the worth of adopting these styles to improve the quality of products developed from my experience...
When building applications we usually want to adopt the write once user everywhere or DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) goals for simpler maintenance, validation, configuration,etc etc. So for business applications the situation is usually develop a control, that can be re-used and that can have different data bound to it for the situation in which it is used. Silverlight has a fantastic mechanism – the Silverlight Property System - that manages data binding among other things. This means that the late...
This is the final post in a four part series to demonstrate how to use the standard MSFT technologies to implement a CRUD data application in Silverlight. The steps in this post build upon those completed in part 3. The goal of this series is to show those of you who are relatively new to Silverlight how analogous building such an app in Silverlight is to say building it in ASP.NET, Win Forms or WPF. This app is built on Visual Studio 2008 SP1, SQL Server 2008, Silverlight 2.0 and the Silverlight...
This is the second post in a series to demonstrate how to use the standard MSFT technologies to implement a CRUD data application in Silverlight. The steps in this post build upon those completed in part 1. The goal of this series is to show those of you who are relatively new to Silverlight how analogous building such an app in Silverlight is to say building it in ASP.NET, Win Forms or WPF. This app is built on Visual Studio 2008 SP1, SQL Server 2008, Silverlight 2.0 and the Silverlight Toolkit...
This is the first post in a series to demonstrate how to use the standard MSFT technologies to implement a CRUD data application in Silverlight. This post is beginners stuff - there’s nothing advanced here. Most readers with some experience of Silverlight will learn nothing from this post, but I want to start at the beginning so those of you who are relatively new to Silverlight can see how analogous building such an app in Silverlight is to say building it in ASP.NET, Win Forms or WPF. This app...
In January and March 2009 I presented to the East Bay .NET and San Francisco Bay .NET user groups respectively on how to build business applications in Silverlight. The theme of the presentations was to show how developing line of business applications in Silverlight is extremely similar to other technologies like Win Forms, WPF or ASP.NET. I demoed how to build a simple CRUD application in Silverlight hitting a SQL Server database over WCF. The building of the application during the presentation...