Since Windows 8 has been released on MSDN, many have run into problems on how to use the Enterprise version and get it to activate. As you may have noticed, during setup, you can’t enter your own key. So, how to get things to work. Follow the next simple steps and enjoy the fun of Windows 8 in full :)
Now start customizing that start screen!
Last week, I was busy with another user group tour in the UK for Telerik. This year, I was able to give a total of 7 sessions in 4 cities (Hereford, Cheltenham, Bristol and Southampton). A lot of people stopped by to join me on an exploration of some Windows 8 and Windows Phone talks. During the talks, we looked at the upcoming Telerik controls for Windows 8 which will make LOB development much easier in the Windows 8 space!
Here are some of the pictures of some of the evenings:
All the slides and demos can be downloaded below.
Thanks for stopping by to all that attended!
For the third year in a row, I was selected as a speaker at NDC Oslo, in my opinion one of the best developer conferences. If you're a developer, this is THE conference that should be on your agenda starting next year. All videos from this and past editions can be found at http://www.vimeo.com/ndcoslo.
This year, I was asked to do 2 sessions: Windows Phone 7.5 Background workers and Advanced WinRT. Here are all the demos and slides for both sessions:
Windows Phone 7 Background workers: Slides - Demos
Advanced WinRT: Slides - Demos
I’m very proud to officially announce that the registrations for Community Day 2012 are open. Like all the previous editions, thanks to the numerous sponsors, the event is completely free. This year, we’ve outdone ourselves: we have a 6th track, over 40 deep-technical sessions and the best networking opportunities available.
So, don’t wait to register.
Below you can find all the details of the event:
Location: Utopolis Mechelen (Map)
Address: Spuibeekstraat 5 2800 Mechelen
Event date: Thursday June 21th
Start & end time:8.30 - 19.00
Add Community Day 2012 to your agenda: Outlook
*.ics file
Participating user groups:
Our sponsors! They make the event possible!
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If you’re considering buying my new book, but you’re not sure if it’s a good fit for what you’re looking, the following might help! You can now download a sample chapter where you can see the style of the book as well as get some real information!
Download the sample chapter here.
Noted the quietness on my blog? Well, it’s about to stop as I can proudly present where I’ve been spending all my free hours on: my new book: Silverlight 5 Data and Services Cookbook. This book is the sequel to my first book, Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook.
The first version did very well (it’s a five-star book on Amazon UK and Amazon.com!) so we decided that the latest version of Silverlight deserved a good book in the enterprise space as well! This is why Kevin Dockx and myself wrote a whopping 650 page book.
Should you buy the second version if you already have the first edition? Well, for starters, the new book has more than 200 extra pages, all the existing recipes have been reviewed and modified for Silverlight 5. Over 35 new recipes have been added which deeply cover MVVM, RIA Services, local data and even Windows Phone 7. And of course, all the new features that come with Silverlight 5 have been added in new recipes as well! I think it’s well worth the investment!
Here’s a complete description (actually, it’s the back cover :) ):
Microsoft Silverlight is a programmable web browser plugin that enables features
including animation, vector graphics, and audio-video playback – features that characterize
Rich Internet Applications. However, Silverlight is a great (and growing) Line-Of-Business
platform and is increasingly being used to build data-driven business applications,
both in an out of the browser. It is also the heart of Windows Phone 7 development
so developers can leverage their knowledge on Microsoft’s new mobile platform as well.
Services enable efficient access to your data, allowing you to draw on multiple sources
of data and solve particular data problems. There is very little existing material
that demonstrates how to build data-driven, enterprise-ready solutions with the platform.
Silverlight 3 and 4 made a big step into Line-Of-Business data services and Silverlight
5 builds further upon this.
In this book, Gill Cleeren, Microsoft Regional Director, Silverlight MVP (former ASP.NET
MVP), Telerik MVP at Ordina Belgium and Kevin Dockx, a technical specialist/project
leader on .NET web applications and a solution manager for Rich Applications at RealDolmen,
focus on showing .NET developers how to get their finger on the pulse of data-driven
business applications in Silverlight and Windows Phone 7. What’s more, the upcoming
Windows 8 will allow developers to build native, immersive Metro-style applications
using XAML & C# - exactly what this book is based upon. In other words, the techniques
described in this book also apply to Windows 8.
This book is not a general Silverlight 4/5 overview book; it is uniquely aimed at
developers who want to build data-driven applications, based on best practices. It
focuses on showing .NET developers how to interact with, and handle multiple sources
of data in Silverlight business applications, and how to solve particular data problems
following a practical hands-on approach, using real-world recipes. It is a practical
cookbook that teaches you how to build data-rich business applications with Silverlight
that draw on multiple sources of data. Most of the features covered work both in Silverlight
4 and 5. However, we cover some that are specific to Silverlight 5, which will therefore
not work with Silverlight 4. Where this is the case, it is clearly indicated.
Packed with reusable, real-world recipes, the book begins by introducing you to general
principles when programming Silverlight. It then dives deep into the world of data
and services, covering all the options available to access data and communicate with
services to get the most out of data in your Silverlight business applications, whilst
at the same time providing a rich user experience. This book also covers topics related
to storing data locally as well as explaining how to work with data and services in
a Model-View-View-Model (MVVM) architecture. Most of the content is applicable to
Windows Phone 7 developers as well; a specific chapter on WP7 development is included
in this release. By following the practical recipes in this book, which are of varying
difficulty levels, you will learn the concepts needed to create data-rich business
applications—from the creation of a Silverlight application, to displaying data in
the Silverlight application and applying best practices such as MVVM. Each recipe
covers a data services topic, going from the description of the problem, through a
conceptual solution to a solution containing sample code.
The complete table of contents can be viewed on the publisher’s site: http://www.packtpub.com/microsoft-silverlight-5-data-and-services-cookbook/book
Interested in getting your hands on a copy? You can buy directly from the publisher or go via Amazon or Barnes and Noble, Safari or one of the many online retailers!
With a bit of delay, here are the slides and demos of my 2 talks I gave at the SDN Conference in Zeist, The Netherlands.
Let’s explore Silverlight 5: Slides – Demos
Silverlight and Azure: Slides – Demos
Small note: the Silverlight 5 demos were built for the RC version of Silverlight 5 and need a rebuild before they’ll work with the RTM version.
To complete the travelling of 2011, I spent the last week of November touring the entire UK for another user group tour for Telerik (the second one in the UK this year). Telerik is very active in the support of user groups: through the Telerik Insider program, speakers can be requested to go and talk to user groups all over the world, entirely sponsored by Telerik. During the talks, which are deep-dive technical talks, licenses and swag is given to attendees.
This tour brought me in the Northern part of the country, more specifically, I visited a user group in Liverpool, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. At each location, we did 2 sessions. One of these that we “repeated” at each location was an introduction to Windows 8 and WinRT development. This of course triggered a lot of interesting discussion and questions. Each stop also filled their rooms quite well! We were lucky to have good weather (we had, apart from one single rain shower, not a single day of rain in Scotland in the last week of November!) so I made all the cities in place. Also, the weather triggered high show-rates.
I brought home a few things from Scotland, including a cold that is now in its 10th day. This caused me to be delayed in posting all the content. But now, without further delay, here’s all the files (slides and demos) of all talks:
Windows 8 – Windows Runtime: slides – demos
Liverpool: Building a Windows Phone 7 app from start to finish:
slides – demos
Newcastle: Silverlight and Azure
slides – demos
Edinburgh: Building a Windows Phone 7 app from start to finish
slides – demos
Aberdeen: Silverlight 5 for LOB Development
slides – demos
I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for all the user groups for their work!
Year after year thousands of technology professionals come together to network with peers and experts, while diving deep into Microsoft technologies and learning about the latest products and solutions. Microsoft TechDays is one of the premier technical events in Belgium & Luxembourg and not to be missed.
With more technology areas than ever to explore, TechDays 2012 is the perfect place to get up-to-speed on the latest Microsoft technologies and up-level your skill on the technology you use every day. Content will be delivered by industry experts and Microsoft product team members.
Join our 10th anniversary edition in a new location (Kinepolis Imagibraine - Braine l'Alleud) and learn about:
After 3 great years in Metropolis Antwerp we’re moving TechDays to a new location: Kinepolis Imagibraine in Braine l’Alleud (Eigenbrakel). The movie theatre is easily reachable both by car and via public transportation.
If you’re coming by train: the Braine l’Alleud train station is very
well connected with major cities in Belgium:
- Antwerp: direct connection from Antwerpen-Centraal taking approx.
1 hour
- Ghent: 1 hour trip from Gent Sint-Pieters, switching trains once
at Brussel-Zuid
- Brugge: 1,5 hour trip switching trains once at Brussel-Zuid
- Hasselt: 1,5 hour trip switching trains once at Brussel-Zuid
- Leuven: 50 min trip switching trains once at Brussel-Noord
- Mons: 1 hour trip switching trains once at Brussel-Zuid
- Namur: 1 hour trip switching trains once at Charleroi-Sud
- Liège: 1,5 hour trip switching trains once at Brussel-Zuid
- Brussels: 15 minutes from Brussel-Zuid
There is a direct bus line (bus 67 from the TEC company) running from the Braine l’Alleud train station to Kinepolis Imagibraine, taking about 10 minutes.
Coming by car? Kinepolis Imagibraine is just 5 minutes from the R0 highway (exit 24). Driving directions are available here.
I seem to have forgotten to upload the slides and demos of my talk at the UX Tour event last week in Antwerp, Belgium. You can now download them below here.
I’m getting ready for yet another user group tour for Telerik, the second time in the UK and Scotland this year (earlier I did Cambridge, Oxford and several other cities). Since Telerik is sponsoring these sessions, I can give away some licenses on each stop as well! Each evening, we’ll do some deep technical talks on XAML-related topics.
This time, I’m heading more to the North of the country: I’ll be stopping in Liverpool, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. In each city, I’ll be doing 2 talks. For most evenings, some seats are still available so you can still register. All sessions are of course free and some food (I guess pizza :) ) will be available as well.
Registering can be done through the following links.
I hope to see you there!
While I was teaching a Windows Phone 7 class in Oslo, Norway, I found the time to stop by at the local NNUG user group. I gave 2 talks and as promised, you can download the slides and demos below:
Silverlight
5 LOB Development
MVVM
in Silverlight
I hope you enjoyed them, thanks to all attendees (over 70!) for stopping by on such short notice!
I had the privilege to speak at DevReach in Sofia, Bulgaria this week. DevReach is a great conference, sponsored mainly by Telerik. Now in its sixth edition, the conference always manages to have some of the best speakers around, including Scott Hanselman, Carl Franklin, Richard Campbell and many others.
I gave 2 talks on Silverlight. As promised, you can download the code and slide decks below:
Silverlight 5 LOB Development: Slides – Demos
Advanced Silverlight Development: Slides - Demos
On Wednesday 24th August, I gave a webinar on Advanced Silverlight 5 development for SilverlightShow.net. The webinar was attended by a lot of people and I got a lot of great feedback on it. Thanks!
As promised, you can download the slides and the demos from my blog:
Today, Wednesday August 24th, I’ll be doing a one hour tour of the advanced new features available in Silverlight 5. I will explain what you’ll be using in 2012 for all your Silverlight needs!
These are some of the topics that will be covered during the session:
The webinar is free of course and you can win a prize!
Registration can be done here.
When developing LightSwitch applications with Visual Studio, a newly created (and built) solution is quite heavy on disk space. We are talking of about 100 – 130MB per solution.
While creating the course material for Ordina’s upcoming LightSwitch course, I typically create many demo solutions, totaling several gigs of DLLs. Luckily, I found a *.cmd file in the downloads of Wrox’s excellent LightSwitch book: Beginning Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch Development by István Novák.
Running this file cleans all unnecessary files (which are recreated by Visual Studio) from the solution folder, making it easier to store many solutions on your local disk.
This is the contents of the *.CMD file:
@echo off
del /Q /S /A:H <solutionName>.suo
cd .\<solutionName>
del /Q /S Client\bin
rd /Q /S Client\bin
del /Q /S Client\obj
rd /Q /S Client\obj
del /Q /S ClientGenerated\bin
rd /Q /S ClientGenerated\bin
del /Q /S ClientGenerated\obj
rd /Q /S ClientGenerated\obj
del /Q /S Common\bin
rd /Q /S Common\bin
del /Q /S Common\obj
rd /Q /S Common\obj
del /Q /S Server\bin
rd /Q /S Server\bin
del /Q /S Server\obj
rd /Q /S Server\obj
del /Q /S bin\Debug
rd /Q /S bin\Debug
del /Q /S bin\Release
rd /Q /S bin\Release
del /Q /S ServerGenerated\bin
rd /Q /S ServerGenerated\bin
del /Q /S ServerGenerated\obj
rd /Q /S ServerGenerated\obj
del /Q /S _Pvt_Extensions
rd /Q /S _Pvt_Extensions
cd ..
echo Cleanup completed.
pause
You can download the file from this link as well as a ZIP file: Cleanup.zip (.36 KB). If you download the samples of the book, you’ll have the file as well.
Cleaning your solution comes down to pasting this file in the same directory as where the solution (*.sln) (and *.suo if present) file are located:
I’m proud to announce that the “Real World .NET 4 and C#” book on which 15 MVPs are working together, is coming close to its release. I’ve written a chapter in this book as well, on Silverlight 5 and MVVM development.
Written by a group of experienced MVPs, this unparalleled book delves into the intricate—and often daunting—world of .NET 4. Each author draws from a particular area of expertise to provide invaluable information on using the various .NET 4, C# 4, Silverlight 4, and Visual Studio tools in the real world. The authors break down the vast .NET 4 Framework into easily digestible portions to offer you a strong foundation on what makes .NET such a popular and successful framework for building a wide range of solutions.
Real World .NET 4 and C# is the ultimate resource for discovering and understanding the .NET 4 Framework.
The book can be pre-ordered already from Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Real-World-NET-Silverlight-Indispensible/dp/1118021967/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1312574616&sr=8-1
Meanwhile, I’m focusing on my next full Silverlight 5 book, which is due for release end of this year or very early next year!
I’m happy to announce that a new ebook of mine has been published: Getting Ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506.
This ebook is based on SilverlightShow 7-part article series ‘Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506’. While the online article series give references to many external resources, several for one topic, in this ebook we picked the best resource covering the topic, and have included it as full text, together with links to source code where available. Note: approximately 85% of the resources selected are available in full, the rest of the resources are still included as links due to lack of copy permissions or inability to reach the the respective authors.
This ebook collects a total of 100+ articles in full.
Download Table of Contents (.doc / .docx)
From the author: Silverlight is a rapidly evolving technology. Over a time span of 3 years, it has evolved from being a JavaScript-based platform to a full .NET implementation. With 4 versions released and version 5 in the pipeline at the time of writing, Silverlight has more versions than .NET! That makes it hard for book writers such as me to keep up with new features being added.
It seems to me that it’s also difficult to create and manage exams about Silverlight. For the previous versions of Silverlight, there weren’t any exams available. Silverlight 4 is the first version of which an exam is being created. It was possible to take the beta-exam late 2010; the exam will be officially open in Q1 2011. More information about the exam can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/Exam.aspx?ID=70-506&Locale=en-us
With this guide, I aim to make the preparation for the exam a bit easier.
Goal and approach to getting ready
At this point, there’s no official courseware available to study for the exam. In any case, you should therefore be familiar already with Silverlight development. Reading some books on Silverlight will help as well. The list below contains some links to books available for Silverlight 4:
On top of that, reading articles and blog posts will help you in passing the exam. In this ebook, I try to create an extensive list of resources along with some explanation on the topic at hand that contain the information you need to know. To structure this, we’ll follow the list of topics described by Microsoft on the exam outline page (http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/Exam.aspx?ID=70-506&Locale=en-us#tab2):
(Small note: the outlined percentages total 99%, so you’ll probably get 1% for entering your name!)
Last week, I travelled through the UK to give a total of 8 sessions for Telerik to 4 chapters of the NxtGenUg.net user groups. More specifically, I went to Hereford, Oxford, Coventry and Cambridge. It was a pleasure being there, since we had some nice discussions throughout the talks (which of course caused all sessions to run longer than expected, some about 2,5-3 hours :) ). For the first time, I did everything by train and all went well (not a single delay on the 10 trains I took in the UK. I even had to pass through London when going from one station to another to go from Coventry to Cambridge).
This tour was sponsored again by my good friends at Telerik, which help to get speakers to user groups with the program I am in. If you have a user group yourself and want me to come over, let me know! It’s entirely free and I can give away some nice swag and licenses at each talk!
Here are some pictures of last week:
And as promised, here are all the slides and demos of all the sessions:
Last week, I did another webinar for Silverlight Show titled Expression Blend 4 for developers. If you were unable to attend, you can view the recorded version on-demand here (it’s free :) )
The slides can be found here and the demos you can download here.
Enjoy!
Community Day 2011 is over (sadly)… But since we had so much fun, that isn’t a problem: we have a great day of Belgian community at its very best! Judging from the feedback, this was the very best edition so far, so that’s good news :)
We had over 300 attendees seeing 32 sessions spread over 5 tracks. Most slides are already available from the agenda page.
I want to thank you all for being there. Of course, a big thank you to the team, the sponsors and the people from BBDO!
Here are some pictures of the event, the entire list can be seen here.
Tomorrow, Thursday June 16th, I’ll be doing another webinar for SilverlightShow. I think that this one if the 7th webinar I’m doing for them!
This one is totally devoted to Expression Blend: Expression Blend for developers. That means (sadly) that I won’t be doing any drawing or graphics-related stuff! I’m going to talk about how I think XAML developers can be more productive with Expression Blend instead of only using Visual Studio for their work.
This is the agenda:
The outline of the webinar is here and of course you can subscribe for free. The webinar takes about 75 minutes.
A nice extra is that my publisher (Packt Publishing) is giving away 3 copies of the LITE edition of the book I wrote together with Kevin Dockx. So by simply attending, you could win a book!
I
hope to see you online tomorrow!
I enjoyed a lot being at NDC 2011 (Oslo, Norway) again for the second year. I gave two sessions, one on LightSwitch and a second one on Expression Blend. I hope you enjoyed them. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me!
Here are the downloads as promised
Switch on the LightSwitch: Slides – Demos
Expression Blend 4 for developers: Slides - Demos
The passed TechDays Belgium were another great event, showing that Belgians really know how to organize an event. If you couldn’t attend, you missed a lot to be honest.
But, fear not my dear reader, as all sessions have been recorded and you can see them for free on Channel9: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechDays/TechDays-2011-Belgium
My personal favorites:
I haven’t had the time to blog about it, but yes, you can register for Community Day 2011 since a few days. Registrations are going fast, so the best advice I can give you is to register quickly!
The event is still entirely free (including food) and we are again in Utopolis Mechelen. The venue is completely renovated, giving us a lot more space.
This year, we are celebrating our 5th edition. For this occasion, we are inviting 2 Dutch user groups (DotNed and Sixin) who will give sessions at the event as well. We are also doing 30 sessions instead of 24, so you’ll have more choice than ever to fill your free day of learning.
Convinced? I bet you are! Go here for registration, check out our sponsors or take a look at the agenda!
I will see you on June 23rd!
Suppose you’re willing to start learning Silverlight enterprise development and you want a good book to start. There are quite a few really good books on the market covering Silverlight 4. If you’re interested mostly in getting to know how to work with data, services and other enterprise-related topics, my own book is a really good start (here you can read some reviews as well).
If you’re not really sure on whether my book will help you, you can purchase a lite (light) version of it now for a mere $9.95. That’s right: you get a few relevant chapters without spending a lot of cash. You can read more about it here.
Here’s what you get:
I just noticed that all DevDays 11 Netherlands sessions are available for online viewing.
You can see them here.
My talk on jQuery can be found here.
Looking at the comments, I think attendees (around 350 I guess) liked what they saw
:)
All slides and demos are available here in
case you want to try out what I’ve been showing in the talk!
On May 26th, Ordina is organizing a free technology event. Ordina’s technology specialists will give 21 sessions of 30 minutes, spread over 5 tracks. The event is free for everyone to join, registration is required. You can register here: www.ordina.be/differentiate.
We will have the following sessions for you to attend:
Agenda: Stand out from the crowd with Microsoft technology on May 26, 6 pm
30-minute sessions – the choice is yours
.Net
Visual Studio LightSwitch
Building a Windows Phone7 application: lessons learnt
C#5 Async
SharePoint
Automated scripted deployment of SharePoint
SharePoint 2010: architectural overview
Developing against SharePoint 2010 lists
SQL
Where .Net meets SQL Server: SQL CLR
Extending to multilingual reporting
Using geo data within Report Builder 3.0
Application Lifecycle Management
Automate your deployment cycle with TFS Build 2010 and Workflow
4
Delivering quality software with TFS 2010
Team Explorer Everywhere: TFS and Java, better together
Azure
Reporting services in the cloud
Moving a legal application in the cloud
Windows Phone7 and the cloud
Infrastructure
Unified Communications: Lync
Unified Communications: Office 365
Hyper-V
Enterprise Portfolio Management
Demand management using workflow in Project Server 2010
Bridging the project and work management gap
Interested? Join us!
With the great weather we’re having, it’s even more obvious that summer is approaching. And we all know what that means, don’t we?
Indeed, Community Day 2011 is coming closer! This fifth edition will be the biggest one we ever did, with more sessions, the best food, great networking opportunities and the best speakers the Belgian (and who knows…) has to offer.
We’ve had a tremendous response from sponsors already and we’re proud to announce the following companies as our sponsors for this year’s edition:
Of course, Community Day 2011 is again a joint event of 13 Belgian user groups. The following user groups are part of this year’s edition:
We’re currently working hard on the agenda, which will be online in 2-3 weeks. At that point, you’ll be able to register as well. Just like previous editions, Community Day 2011 is still a free event.
At this point, I suggest you add the event to your calendar by opening this *.ics file.
To help spread the word about the event, use the following blog bling! Thanks for helping!
As part of the Telerik Insider program, I’ll be touring in the UK this summer. More specifically, I’ll be speaking in Oxford, Hereford, Cambridge and Coventry. On each event, attendees can win a full Telerik license!
You can register here for the events:
I hope to see a lot of you in the UK! (and while you’re at it, reserve me some nice weather!)
About 2 weeks ago, the Telerik insider program has been made official (I only found time to blog about it since we bought a house in that week, causing a lot of extra stress and work :) ). I’m very happy that the word on the program is now official AND that I was one of the first to be part of this fantastic initiative.
Let me start by explaining what the program is all about: The Insiders Program, a speaker’s bureau for the community run by Telerik, is comprised of 14 (thus far) passionate and influential speakers conducting a variety of sessions at community events and user groups. Check out their profiles and abstracts here and our FAQ page for detailed information. The full explanation can be found here: http://blogs.telerik.com/blogs/posts/11-04-04/telerik_insiders_are_out.aspx .
The official press release can be found here: Telerik
Emphasizes Commitment to Developer Community with Globally Expanded Insiders Program. Some
interesting quotes:
The Telerik Insiders Program delivers added value by providing entrée to influential
speakers willing to share their .NET knowledge, insight, and expertise,”
said Svetozar Georgiev, CEO of Telerik.
“I cannot express enough how much of a benefactor Telerik has been to our community throughout the last several years. They support user groups and community events by providing much-needed resources and help, but also go that extra step by providing top-notch, quality speakers who are passionate about training and knowledge-sharing,” says Pensacola User Group leader, Karla Landrum.
“User groups and regional events are really the heart of the developer community – they provide unique opportunities for peer-to-peer engagement, and facilitate sharing of real-world development best practices,” said Emily Parker, Community Program Manager at Telerik.
I was “enrolled” in the program December 2009 and have done quite a few speaker engagements since then. I went to VBUG UK, visited user groups all over Sweden and the Netherlands… This year, I’ll be visiting the UK (5 user groups) and Ireland (5 user groups) in the coming months.
What’s in it for you
The good news is that you can benefit from this program as well. If you have a user group (just about anywhere), you can contact us (insidersprogram@telerik.com) to have a Telerik Insider at your next event. All for free. Just send a mail and we can discuss things.
This Wednesday, April 20th, I’ll be doing a webinar on LightSwitch on SilverlightShow!
LightSwitch is a new part of the Visual Studio family and makes it possible to more easily create professional-quality business applications for the desktop, the web, and the cloud. The big question of course: Is LightSwitch something for you?
In this webinar, you’ll get the answer! Silverlight MVP Gill Cleeren will show how you can build professional LOB applications quickly using LightSwitch. We will cover why you should look at LightSwitch, binding to data, and building out the user interface. LightSwitch is however more than just some predefined screens: developers will love it for its extensibility, which we’ll cover deeply.
As always, the webinar is free but registration is required. You can register here: http://www.silverlightshow.net/news/Upcoming-SilverlightShow-Webinar-Building-LOB-Applications-with-LightSwitch.aspx
At TechDays Sweden, I was able to give away a Telerik license during my talk. The lucky winner gets a full Telerik Ultimate license, worth $1.995! All thanks to the people at Telerik.
And the winner is… Peter Forss! Congratulations!!
And as promised, here are the slides and demos for the Windows Phone 7 presentation.
Slides: http://cid-bd64f22e01fad982.office.live.com/view.aspx/Public/Building%20a%20Windows%20Phone%207%20app%20from%20start%20with%20template.pptx
Demos: http://cid-bd64f22e01fad982.office.live.com/self.aspx/Public/WP7%20End%20to%20end.zip
I just finished my first talk at TechDays Sweden 2011 on jQuery. As promised, you can find the slides and demos here.
I hope you enjoyed the session (sadly not everyone could get in the room) although it was extremely hot in the room. If you have any comments/questions, please send them to me.
Slides: http://cid-bd64f22e01fad982.office.live.com/view.aspx/Public/jQuery.pptx
Demos: http://cid-bd64f22e01fad982.office.live.com/self.aspx/Public/jQueryDemos.zip
Enjoy!
News update for all UK .NET/Silverlight/Windows Phone 7 developers: I'll be touring the UK in the summer, giving quite a few sessions. This new tour is again sponsored by Telerik, meaning that attendees can win licenses of Telerik!
The following cities are currently on my schedule:
Hereford - 4th July
http://www.nxtgenug.net/ViewEvent.aspx?EventID=404
Oxford - 5th July
http://www.nxtgenug.net/ViewEvent.aspx?EventID=405
Coventry - 6th July
http://www.nxtgenug.net/ViewEvent.aspx?EventID=406
Cambridge - 7th July
http://www.nxtgenug.net/ViewEvent.aspx?EventID=407
The exact content will be announced soon. Hope to meet many of you at one of these
events!
Have you been willing to start WP7 development but haven't had the time? Well, maybe this will make you creating some spare time!
Microsoft just took the wraps of a new challenge for WP7 development called WP7 Challenge. More can be found on it via http://wp7challenge.com/.
Basically, it's a contest in which you build an app and if it's selected as the winner, you as the developer can go to WPC 2011 for free. Not a bad deal just to build a Windows Phone application :) All apps should be entered before June 6th 2011.
May the best app win!
In the coming months, I’ll be travelling through Europe and doing sessions in quite a few locations. Here’s when and where you can catch me.
| Event | Date | Location | Sessions |
| TechDays Sweden | March 29-30 | Orebrö, Sweden |
|
| TechDays Switzerland | April 5-6 | Zürich, Switzerland | To jQuery or to Ajax Client Library, that is the question |
| TechDays Belgium | April 26-28 | Antwerp, Belgium | Switch on the LightSwitch |
| TechDays Netherlands | April 27-29 | Den Haag, The Netherlands |
What you, as an ASP.NET developer, need to know about jQuery |
| GeekNight at TechDays | April 28 | Den Haag, The Netherlands | Introduction to the WebMatrix |
| Windows Phone 7 Tour Norway | May 4-6 | Oslo, Norway | 3 day intensive training on Windows Phone 7 |
| Windows Phone 7 Tour Belgium | May 11-13 | Brussels, Belgium | 3 day intensive training on Windows Phone 7 |
| Silverlight Tour Belgium | May 16-20 | Brussels, Belgium | 5 day intensive training on Silverlight 4 |
| TechDays UK | May 26th | London, UK | WCF RIA Services for Productive Silverlight App Development |
| NDC 2011 | June 8-10 | Oslo, Norway |
|
| Silverlight Tour Norway | June 15-17 | Oslo, Norway | 5 day intensive training on Silverlight 4 |
| Community Day Belgium | June 23 | Mechelen, Belgium | TBD |
| Windows Phone 7 Tour The Netherlands | 27-29 June | Utrecht, The Netherlands | 3 day intensive training on Windows Phone 7 |
| Telerik Tour UK (TBC) | July 4-8 | All over the UK | TBD |
| Telerik Tour Ireland (TBC) | September 19-23 | All over Ireland | TBD |
It’s going to be a very busy couple of months. I hope to see many of you on one of these events!
Just a small reminder that this Wednesday, I’m doing another SilverlightShow webinar titled “Switching on the cloud for Silverlight”.
What happens if you combine 2 of the hottest technologies for your applications?
Find
out in this very session!
If we combine the capabilities of Windows Azure with the rich UX
of Silverlight, we are capable of building great... what am I saying: exceptional
web applications. We'll look at building an app in Silverlight running from
Azure and we'll look at the topics of interest that you'll encounter when hosting
services in the cloud to be consumed from Silverlight, considerations for Windows
Azure Storage if used from Silverlight etc.
Webinar agenda:
Parts of Windows Azure
Why does a Silverlight developer need to care?
Developing for Windows Azure
Required tools
Emulators (“local cloud”)
Azure Portal
Moving Silverlight applications to the cloud
Database only
WCF
REST
Entire Silverlight applications
RIA Services
Azure as intermediate layer for Twitter
Using blob storage
Silverlight/Azure video player
Windows Phone and Azure
Accessing services in the cloud
WP7 Push Notification services
As always, these webinars are free and you can register here: http://www.silverlightshow.net/news/Upcoming-Silverlight-Show-Webinar-Switching-on-the-Cloud-for-Silverlight.aspx
If you are one of my Norwegian readers (or any other reader willing to visit the great city of Oslo while learning WP7 :) ), I’ll be teaching Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 at ProgramUtvikling in Oslo, Norway in the coming months.
You can register now for the Windows Phone 7 training already using this link.
Writing Apps for a phone was never so easy. With Silverlight you can build applications for the Windows Phone 7 as easy as you can build a web widget. When youre ready to dive into building applications for phones, this is the course for you.
Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 is a three–day course on Windows Phone 7 Series development using Silverlight. It divides the content into three distinct areas: Design, Development and the Server–Side. Students should be able to develop applications for the phone once they have attended the course. The Course is structured with a mix of didactic lessons, demonstrations and hands–on labs. Each student will leave the course having created several small Silverlight applications. This variety of learning techniques will ensure that all students become proficient in the technology quickly and in an exciting way.
The reason I haven’t been blogging here is that I was busy writing the Silverlight exam guide. The good news is that the entire guide is now ready and available at SilverlightShow! Here are all the parts for you to explore
Enjoy!
I was notified that part 2 of my Silverlight exam preparation guide was made available
at SilverlightShow. You can read part 2 here: http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/Getting-ready-for-Microsoft-Silverlight-Exam-70-506-Part-2.aspx .
Enjoy!
Today, I got some great news: some of my sessions that I proposed for Mix 11 in Las Vegas made the first cut! That means that you can now all vote for them via the OpenCall page on the Mix 11 site!
So, want me out of here? This is your chance to send me to Vegas, baby!! Voting can be done here: http://live.visitmix.com/OpenCall . All votes are really appreciated, thanks in advance!
These are my sessions that made the first selection:
Love one (or more) of these sessions? Please vote! Thanks!
The Silverlight exam (70-506) is being released soon. Together with the people of SilverlightShow, I decided to create a guide to help with the exam preparation. The first part is online now, you can find it here.
Here’s something interesting from my publisher, Packt Publishing: Microsoft Monday. On Monday 24th of January, Packt is set to release 5 books on Microsoft technologies. To celebrate this, they are giving away a year’s subscription on their entire library of Microsoft books. More info can be found here.
Additionally, all Packt books get a 25% discount if you buy 2 books! That includes my book as well!
My good friends from SilverlightShow have announced their 2011 contest: the Eco Contest! I am selected to be one of the five judges this year!
What is this contest about?
2011 has been declared the International
Year of Forests by the United Nations. We at SilverlightShow
would like to join the worldwide efforts to promote a broader understanding of sustainable
forest management and generate ideas to participate in the celebration of forests
throughout 2011 and beyond.
We initiate this year's Forests Eco Contest to show the power that
Silverlight technologies have in conveying an idea, and reach a huge audience in no
time with striking visual and interactive features. Be a part of this year's challenge; tiny
individual steps can lead us to a greener and sustainable future on this planet we
all share.
The Contest
We invite you to take part in our contest by creating a Silverlight application that informs about the critical situation with forests preservation, or urges to take actions in protecting this resource. We, on our end, will make sure, that your applications reached as many people as possible. Please read the Official Rules of our green contest!
The Judges
Cigdem Patlak - community vote winner
in SilvelightShow Eco Contest 2010,
Silveright MVP
Emil Stoychev - founder of SilverlightShow,
Silverlight MVP
Gill Cleeren - Microsoft Regional Director, SilverlightShow
Webinar Presenter, Silverlight MVP
Brian Noyes - Microsoft Regional Director, Silverlight
MVP
Tim Heuer - Microsoft program manager for
Microsoft Silverlight
All the information can be found here: http://contest.silverlightshow.net/
I’ll be at Ordina Netherlands (Nieuwegein) for the ”Innoveer jij mee” event on February
7th.
SilverLight 4 door Gill Cleeren
Op maandag 7 februari a.s. geeft Gill Cleeren een masterclass. Gedurende het
programma is er aandacht voor de positionering van Silverlight met name in het licht
van desktops en mobile devices (als Windows Phone 7). Natuurlijk is er aansluitend
veel aandacht voor de technische in’s and out’s van Silverlight 4 en de wijze waarop
applicaties met Silverlight 4 ontwikkeld kunnen worden.
Silverlight is Microsoft’s platform voor het ontwikkelen van Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s) op desktops en mobile devices als Windows Phone 7, Microsoft’s nieuwe mobiele platform.
Microsoft heeft veel geïnvesteerd in Silverlight en Silverlight is inmiddels toe aan zijn vierde iteratie (Silverlight 4) en daarmee klaar voor de ontwikkeling van business applicaties.
Registration is free but obligatory at https://www.ordina.nl/nieuws/evenementen/kennissessie/20110207%20-%20innoveer%20jij%20mee%20-%20silverlight%204%20door%20gill%20cleeren.aspx.
With the new year now almost 2 weeks old, we have put online the first Visug events of 2011 (and we have a great list of upcoming ones as well, more on that soon).
To start with a bang, we have Scott Hanselman doing a session on January 24th! The final session content will be available soon, but it will be in the MVC/NuGet area. As we expect this to be fully booked very soon, register quickly via http://visug.be/Eventdetails/tabid/95/EventId/37/Default.aspx
Secondly, Bart Wullems will be doing a session on Caliburn.Micro.
You've heard a lot about Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM), but you've struggled to
see how it can help you in your day-to-day work. Or, you're experienced at implementing
MVVM, but looking for some ways to maximize your investment in this methodology. In
this session, we explore Caliburn.Micro(http://caliburnmicro.codeplex.com/),
a simple MVVM framework, by iteratively identifying pain points in our UI development
and eliminating them with simple solutions. You'll walk away with code, but more importantly
with an understanding of how to apply some simple ideas to improve productivity with
MVVM in your own projects.
Register here: http://visug.be/Eventdetails/tabid/95/EventId/36/Default.aspx
It will be another great Visug year!
On January 24th, the first Belgian Web Camp takes place. Some updates have been done to the agenda, including another speaker being added.
This is the final agenda:
8:30 - 9:00 Welcome and registration
9:00 - 11:00
Opening Keynote – What’s new in the Microsoft Web Platform
(Scott
Hanselman, Principle Program Manager, Microsoft)
Just recently, Microsoft have released a bunch of new products that web developers
can use to build websites and web applications. Scott, Drew and Jonathan will
take you on a whirlwind tour of what’s new in the Microsoft Web Platform, including
ASP.NET MVC 3, NuGet and more.
11:00 - 11:30 Coffee Break
11:30 - 12:30
HTML5: How about today?
(Katrien De Graeve, Developer
Evangelist, Microsoft)
What is HTML5? With more and more browsers supporting HTML5, ECMAScript 5 and
other web standards, developers now have a strong web platform they can use to create
a new class of web application that is more powerful and interactive than ever before.
What's in HTML5 that lets us take our sites to the next level?
Expect demos and code!
12:30 - 13:30 Lunch
13:30 - 14:45
Come in as jQuery zero, go out as jQuery hero
(Gill
Cleeren)
jQuery is the web developers’ new favorite. This lightweight JavaScript library
has developers writing JavaScript code again, and loving it! What previously needed
20 lines of code can now be done in just 3 lines. Who wouldn’t be enthusiastic? Microsoft
showed its love for the library by fully integrating it in Visual Studio. I dare to
ask: should you stay behind? In this session, we’ll take a look at jQuery and we’ll
teach you what you need to know to get you on your way. More specifically, we’ll look
at selectors, attributes, working with WCF, jQuery UI, and much more. You could easily
walk out of this session wearing a sticker: “I love jQuery”!
14:45 - 15:15 Coffee Break
15:15 - 16:30
OData: Open Data for the Open Web
(Jonathan Carter,
Senior Technical Evangelist, Microsoft)
There is no shortage of valuable data being generated by applications, reports,
tools, Web sites, etc. Unfortunately, this leaves many of us wishing we could programmatically
access the data and logic behind an app, report, or Web site. To break down data silos
and increase the shared value of data and its associated business logic through the
Web, Microsoft has recently announced the Open Data Protocol which enables exposing
any data source as a Web-friendly data feed. Join this session to understand what
the Open Data Protocol (OData) is and how it adds end-user and developer value to
many of Microsoft's leading products and services (such as SharePoint Server 2010,
Microsoft Codename "Dallas", Windows Azure, SQL Server Reporting Services, SQL Server
PowerPivot for Excel, Visual Studio, .NET, Silverlight, AJAX, etc.), as well as being
accessible from a range of platforms such as Java and PHP. "
16:30 - 17:30 Closing drink
Registration can be completed here (there
are a few seats left!!)
Location:
Business Faculty
St. Lendriksborre 6 / Font Saint Landry 6
Brussel - Neder over Heembeek 1120
Belgium
You can also watch the live stream but you need to register from here.
And if you want to view the event from within your company, you can get a free breakfast
(Register here)
If in this new year, you want to hop onto a new job, why not try Ordina Air? We’re hiring talented people!
Go to ordina-air.ordina.be and check in for your new job!
I just noticed that the book I’m writing a chapter for these days is announced on Amazon already, although the release is still some time away. The book is titled Real World .NET 4 and C#: Indispensible Experiences from 15 .NET and C# MVPs and can be pre-ordered from Amazon from now.
(That’s
me on the right there on the cover… ;-) )
They did completely misspell my name though (I got renamed to Gil Gleeren for some reason), I’m looking into getting this fixed.
Meanwhile, my very first book I wrote with Kevin Dockx still keeps doing great and getting great reviews, both at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk!
After checking my mailbox frantically for the last couple of hours, I just got my confirmation mail that I’m awarded MVP for the 4th year!
This one was a bit special though, as I’m changed from ASP.NET MVP to Silverlight MVP!
When working with MVVM, the Command pattern is used to bind actions (such as a Click on a Button) in the View with commands in the ViewModel. The ICommand interface in Silverlight has 3 members:
//
Summary:
//
Defines the contract for commanding, using the same contract as used in WPF.
public
interface ICommand
{
//
Summary:
//
Occurs when changes occur that affect whether the command should execute.
event EventHandler
CanExecuteChanged;
//
Summary:
//
Defines the method that determines whether the command can execute in its
//
current state.
//
//
Parameters:
//
parameter:
//
Data used by the command. If the command does not require data to be passed,
//
this object can be set to null.
//
//
Returns:
//
true if this command can be executed; otherwise, false.
bool CanExecute(object parameter);
//
//
Summary:
//
Defines the method to be called when the command is invoked.
//
//
Parameters:
//
parameter:
//
Data used by the command. If the command does not require data to be passed,
//
this object can be set to null.
void Execute(object parameter);
}
The fact whether or not the command can be executed (read: a Button is enabled or not) depends on the boolean value returned by the CanExecute. By default, this value is evaluated on first load of the View: a Save button should initially be disabled. However, during user input, this value has to be re-evaluated: after the user has filled in a field, we need to check if the Save button should be enabled. For this purpose, the CanExecuteChanged event exist. This event should be raised whenever the value of CanExecute should be evaluated once again.
In MVVM Light, the lightwork MVVM framework by Laurent Bugnion, a method called RaiseCanExecuteChanged exists on the RelayCommand class for this very purpose. Let’s take a look at how we can use this method.
I have a very basic view, containing some TextBox fields. Note that initially, the Save button is disabled:
The XAML code is shown below. The fields are bound to a Person object, that I expose in the ViewModel (shown further).
<
Grid
Width
="450"
>
<
Grid.RowDefinitions
>
<
RowDefinition
Height
="50"
></
RowDefinition
>
<
RowDefinition
Height
="40"
></
RowDefinition
>
<
RowDefinition
Height
="40"
></
RowDefinition
>
<
RowDefinition
Height
="40"
></
RowDefinition
>
<
RowDefinition
Height
="40"
></
RowDefinition
>
</
Grid.RowDefinitions
>
<
Grid.ColumnDefinitions
>
<
ColumnDefinition
Width
="*"
></
ColumnDefinition
>
<
ColumnDefinition
Width
="*"
></
ColumnDefinition
>
</
Grid.ColumnDefinitions
>
<
TextBlock
x:Name
="FirstNameTextBlock"
Grid.Row="1"
Grid.Column="0"Text="First
name"VerticalAlignment="Center"Margin="3"></TextBlock>
<
TextBlock
x:Name
="LastNameTextBlock"
Grid.Row="2"
Grid.Column="0"Text="Last
name"VerticalAlignment="Center"Margin="3"></TextBlock>
<
TextBlock
x:Name
="EmailTextBlock"
Grid.Row="3"
Grid.Column="0"Text="Email"VerticalAlignment="Center"Margin="3"></TextBlock>
<
TextBox
x:Name
="FirstNameTextBox"
Grid.Row="1"
Grid.Column="1"VerticalAlignment="Center"HorizontalAlignment="Left"Width="200"
Margin
="3"
Text
="{Binding
Person.FirstName, Mode=TwoWay}"
></
TextBox
>
<
TextBox
x:Name
="LastNameTextBox"
Grid.Row="2"Grid.Column="1"
VerticalAlignment
="Center"
HorizontalAlignment
="Left"
Width
="200"
Margin
="3"
Text
="{Binding
Person.LastName, Mode=TwoWay}"
></
TextBox
>
<
TextBox
x:Name
="EmailTextBox"
Grid.Row="3"Grid.Column="1"
VerticalAlignment
="Center"
HorizontalAlignment
="Left"
Width
="200"
Margin
="3"
Text
="{Binding
Person.Email, Mode=TwoWay}"
></
TextBox
>
<
Button
Content
="Save"
Grid.Row="4"Grid.Column="1"
Command
="{Binding
SaveCommand}"
VerticalAlignment
="Center"
HorizontalAlignment
="Right"
></
Button
>
</
Grid
>
The ViewModel called MainPageViewModel is set as the DataContext for this View. This ViewModel exposes a Person instance (a Model class) and a RelayCommand for the View to bind to.
public
class MainPageViewModel:
ViewModelBase
{
public Person
Person { get; set; }
public RelayCommand
SaveCommand { get; set; }
}
The SaveCommand is initialized as follows:
private
void InitializeCommands()
{
SaveCommand = new RelayCommand(OnSave,
OnCanSave);
}
private
void OnSave()
{
//Perform
save to database
}
public
bool OnCanSave()
{
return !string.IsNullOrEmpty(Person.FirstName)
&& !string.IsNullOrEmpty(Person.LastName)
&& !string.IsNullOrEmpty(Person.Email);
}
Note that the OnCanSave (the implementation of the CanExecuteChanged) will at this point only be called upon binding of the ViewModel. However, I need this to be evaluated every time a value of the bound Person changes: only after all 3 fields have a value, the Save should be enabled.
To implement this, I changed the Person class as follows. It implements the INotifyPropertyChanged interface.
public
class Person
: INotifyPropertyChanged
{
private
string _firstName;
private
string _lastName;
private
string _email;
public
event PropertyChangedEventHandler
PropertyChanged;
public
string FirstName
{
get
{
return _firstName;
}
set
{
if (_firstName
!= value)
{
_firstName = value;
if (PropertyChanged
!= null)
{
PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs("FirstName"));
}
}
}
}
public
string LastName
{
get
{
return _lastName;
}
set
{
if (_lastName
!= value)
{
_lastName = value;
if (PropertyChanged
!= null)
{
PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs("LastName"));
}
}
}
}
public
string Email
{
get
{
return _email;
}
set
{
if (_email
!= value)
{
_email = value;
if (PropertyChanged
!= null)
{
PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs("Email"));
}
}
}
}
}
In the constructor of the ViewModel, I register for the PropertyChanged event being raised from the Person model.
public MainPageViewModel()
{
InitializeCommands();
Person = new Model.Person();
Person.PropertyChanged +=
new System.ComponentModel.PropertyChangedEventHandler(Person_PropertyChanged);
}
In this event handler, I now call the RaiseCanExecuteChanged method, part of the RelayCommand class of MVVM Light.
void Person_PropertyChanged(object sender,
System.ComponentModel.PropertyChangedEventArgs e)
{
SaveCommand.RaiseCanExecuteChanged();
}
This causes the CanExecuteChanged to be raised, causing Silverlight to evaluate again if the Command should be enabled or not. In this particular case, I do this as follows (this code was already shown and executed also on the initial binding):
public
bool OnCanSave()
{
return !string.IsNullOrEmpty(Person.FirstName)
&& !string.IsNullOrEmpty(Person.LastName)
&& !string.IsNullOrEmpty(Person.Email);
}
Whenever a value is provided for all 3 fields, the Button will be enabled.
I’m a fan of SketchFlow, definitely. I really like the tool, part of Expression Blend, to create prototypes of applications I’m building. It gives me a means of talking with the stake holders about how I see the application and change where needed. Because of the support for iterative feedback of the prototype, it’s easy to come to a prototype that is a reflection of what the application will look like in the end. At Ordina, we made sure that our analysts know SketchFlow and use it instead of Visio or PowerPoint during the analysis and requirements gathering phase.
One of the questions I do get a lot is whether it is a good idea to start the development of the “real” application with the code created by SketchFlow. I tend to say no on this question. Why you may ask? Well, here are the reasons for this:
While I say no to reusing the prototype for the final application, I do say yes to perhaps using a part of the generated code.
Enjoy these magical days with your family and loved ones and have a great 2011!
It’s the time of the year again when we everyone starts reflecting on the year that has gone by. While 2010 was great, 2011 is certainly another great one coming up. So instead of thinking of what has been, let’s take a look into 2011… from a Microsoft developer perspective that it :)
While 2010 was the launch year of Visual Studio 2010, in 2011 we’ll get several new things on our plate. No Visual Studio 2011, that’s true, although when thinking about the 18-24 month release cycle of Visual Studio, chances are that we’ll see the first alphas or betas late in 2011. Nothing is disclosed on this at the moment though, so that’s a pure guess of mine.
Silverlight will definitely see a new release in 2011. In H1 2011, we’ll have the beta and in the second half of the year, we’ll have a released version. Silverlight 5 brings many new features, you can watch Scott Guthrie’s keynote on the new version right here.
The statement that was put out with showing the early version of Silverlight 5 put all the blown-out-of-proportion-rumors about Silverlight’s death to rest. It clearly shows that any investment in Silverlight is a safe one, future-proof for years to come. I’m looking forward to doing many sessions on this new version in the new year, that’s for sure!
Heavily related to Silverlight is of course the further development of Windows Phone 7. Released late 2010, the new kid on the block has caused quite a lot of stir in the mobile world. Microsoft created a new, refreshing interface for their devices. Some things are missing, definitely, but due to the easy updating model that is in place, Microsoft can create and distribute updates easily, which is entirely different from previous versions of the mobile OS. Heck, comparing WP7 with Windows Mobile… I should not be doing that! Several (unconfirmed as of yet) updates have been rumored, the first one coming already in January, adding copy/paste functionality as a core function of the phone. Later updates are rumored as well, including a v7.5 in the second half of the year and even Windows Phone 8 in 2012. While these are based on rumors, it shows that Microsoft is both committed to the platform AND investing heavily in creating new, updated version of the OS.
For me as a Silverlight developer, Windows Phone 7 was a gift. I practically didn’t have to learn anything new to become a mobile developer. The tooling around Windows Phone development is by far the best there is, just install the tools in Visual Studio and you’re good to go.
I now personally have a Samsung Omnia 7 (coming from an iPhone 3Gs) and I love the phone. It’s fast, stable (I didn’t restart it since I have it I think)… True, applications are still lacking a bit, but consider that the phone is only here for a couple of months and consider also there are already over 4000 apps in the store and you’ll understand that we’ll have an interesting year there as well. Oh and yes, Angry Birds will be coming to Windows Phone 7 as well (as said by Rovio on Twitter).
Speaking of mobile, 2011 certainly will be the year of the tablet. At CES, taking place in January, there will be a flood of tablets coming out. Small, large, somewhere in between, running Android or Windows 7, we’ll see them all. I do hope here on a strong answer from Microsoft, but there’s nothing confirmed yet. I’m sure we’ll see some really interesting stuff there as well.
To finish off with, let’s hope we’ll see in the new year the next version of Windows (Windows 8??) in some form. There’s very little known currently about the new OS though.
Enjoy these last days of 2010!
I noticed the video recording of my webinar “Building an end-to-end Silverlight 4
application” is now online (90 minutes). I hope you enjoy it and if you have questions,
please contact me via mail or comments.
Video
Slides
and demos were posted here
Since Silverlight 3, we have had the Navigation Application template available. Using this template, we did not need any tricks anymore to do navigation between “pages” (which did not exist in Silverlight 2, we only had the UserControl). In SL3, a Navigation Application was however rather locked down: developers had little to none options available to hook into the navigation process itself.
With Silverlight 4, the INavigationContentLoader interface was introduced. This interface provides a means for us to override how the navigation framework works: we can provide our own logic for the page-loading process. Based on the target URI that is passed in, we can load the page, but we can do other actions as well first. Let’s first look at this interface:
public
interface INavigationContentLoader
{
IAsyncResult BeginLoad(Uri targetUri, Uri currentUri,
AsyncCallback userCallback, object asyncState);
void CancelLoad(IAsyncResult
asyncResult);
bool CanLoad(Uri
targetUri, Uri currentUri);
LoadResult EndLoad(IAsyncResult asyncResult);
}
Because we can provide whatever functionality we want, this simple interface does much more, we can practically do whatever we want when a user clicks on a link. Think of actions such as the following:
The flow to load a page (and the corresponding calls can be seen in the interface):
Let’s now look at a small sample. Assume we have a service that returns, based on the role name of the logged-in user, a list of pages the user has access to.
[OperationContract]
public List<SitePermission>
GetAccesiblePages(string roleName)
{
switch (roleName)
{
case
"user":
return
new List<SitePermission>()
{
new SitePermission(){PageName="/Views/Home.xaml",Allowed= true},
new SitePermission(){PageName="/Views/About.xaml",Allowed= true},
new SitePermission(){PageName="/Views/Products.xaml",Allowed= true},
new SitePermission(){PageName="/Views/Admin.xaml",Allowed= false}
};
case
"administrator":
return
new List<SitePermission>()
{
new SitePermission(){PageName="/Views/Home.xaml",Allowed= true},
new SitePermission(){PageName="/Views/About.xaml",Allowed= true},
new SitePermission(){PageName="/Views/Products.xaml",Allowed= true},
new SitePermission(){PageName="/Views/Admin.xaml",Allowed= true}
};
default:
return
new List<SitePermission>()
{
new SitePermission(){PageName="/Views/Home.xaml",Allowed= false},
new SitePermission(){PageName="/Views/About.xaml",Allowed= false},
new SitePermission(){PageName="/Views/Products.xaml",Allowed= false},
new SitePermission(){PageName="/Views/Admin.xaml",Allowed= false}
};
}
}
In our Silverlight code, we download this list upon start of the application and which each navigation action, we check if the target URI is allowed to be accessed by the user. Because we want to do this using the navigation application template, we need to write a custom implementation of the page loading.
To do this, we start by adding a class that implements the INavigationContentLoader interface.
public
class AutorizedPageContentLoader:INavigationContentLoader
{
...
}
To keep things simple initially, we’ll use the default instance for the page loading process, we’ll only change the CanLoad implementation. In the CanLoad, we need to access the list of SitePermissions, downloaded from the service. The following code is the service call, which was placed here in the App.xaml.cs (could be placed in a custom bootstrapper as well):
public ObservableCollection<SitePermission>
SitePermissions { get; set; }
private
void Application_Startup(object sender,
StartupEventArgs e)
{
LoadSitePermissions();
}
private
void LoadSitePermissions()
{
AuthorizedPageService.AuthorizedPageLoadServiceClient client =
new AuthorizedPageService.AuthorizedPageLoadServiceClient();
client.GetAccesiblePagesCompleted += (s, e) =>
{
SitePermissions = e.Result;
this.RootVisual
= new MainPage();
};
client.GetAccesiblePagesAsync("user");
}
The CanLoad now checks this list and returns true or false based on the requested Uri.
public
bool CanLoad(Uri
targetUri, Uri currentUri)
{
var item = ((App)Application.Current).SitePermissions.
Where(s => s.PageName == targetUri.ToString()).FirstOrDefault();
if (item
!= null)
{
return item.Allowed;
}
return
false;
}
The BeginLoad, EndLoad and CancelLoad can be handled using the default instance of the page loading process:
private PageResourceContentLoader
_loader = new PageResourceContentLoader();
public IAsyncResult
BeginLoad(Uri targetUri, Uri currentUri,
AsyncCallback userCallback, object asyncState)
{
return _loader.BeginLoad(targetUri,
currentUri, userCallback, asyncState);
}
public
void CancelLoad(IAsyncResult
asyncResult)
{
_loader.CancelLoad(asyncResult);
}
public LoadResult
EndLoad(IAsyncResult asyncResult)
{
return _loader.EndLoad(asyncResult);
}
The final thing we need to do is of course making sure that our content loader implementation is used by the navigation frame.
<
navigation:Frame
x:Name
="ContentFrame"
Style
="{StaticResource
ContentFrameStyle}"
Source
="/Home"
Navigated
="ContentFrame_Navigated"
NavigationFailed
="ContentFrame_NavigationFailed"
>
<
navigation:Frame.UriMapper
>
<
uriMapper:UriMapper
>
<
uriMapper:UriMapping
Uri
=""
MappedUri
="/Views/Home.xaml"
/>
<
uriMapper:UriMapping
Uri
="/{pageName}"
MappedUri
="/Views/{pageName}.xaml"
/>
</
uriMapper:UriMapper
>
</
navigation:Frame.UriMapper
>
<
navigation:Frame.ContentLoader
>
<
local:AutorizedPageContentLoader
></
local:AutorizedPageContentLoader
>
</
navigation:Frame.ContentLoader
>
</
navigation:Frame
>
When the user now navigates to the Admin page (which is not allowed), the navigation will not be allowed.
OK, now what is a webcamp then?
Microsoft Web Camps are free events that allow
you to learn and build on the Microsoft Web Platform. Good news: Web Camps
are coming to Belgium!
The Belgian Web Camp event on 24th of January 2011 is a full-day event where will
hear from Microsoft experts on the latest components of the platform, including ASP.NET
MVC 3, jQuery, HTML5, OData and WebMatrix.
Scott Hanselman is doing a two-hour keynote together with James
Senior. I’ll be doing the oData and JQuery sessions and Katrien De Graeve is doing
the HTML5 talk.
Two options to registering for the event:
Location: Business Faculty
St.
Lendriksborre 6 / Font Saint Landry 6
Brussel - Neder over Heembeek 1120
Belgium
Timing: Monday 24 January 2011 – 8:30 to 17:00
Full agenda:
8:30 9:00
Welcome and registration
9:00- 11:00
Opening Keynote by Scott Hanselman and James Senior on ASP.NET MVC 3 and WebMatrix
11:00- 11:30
Coffee Break
11:30- 12:30
HTML5: How about today? (Katrien De Graeve)
What is HTML5? With more and more browsers supporting HTML5, ECMAScript 5 and other
web standards, developers now have a strong web platform they can use to create a
new class of web application that is more powerful and interactive than ever before.
What's in HTML5 that lets us take our sites to the next level?
Expect demos and code!
12:30- 13:30
Lunch
13:30- 14:45
Come in as jQuery zero, go out as jQuery hero (Gill Cleeren)
jQuery is the web developers’ new favorite. This lightweight JavaScript library has developers writing JavaScript code again, and loving it! What previously needed 20 lines of code can now be done in just 3 lines. Who wouldn’t be enthusiastic? Microsoft showed its love for the library by fully integrating it in Visual Studio. I dare to ask: should you stay behind? In this session, we’ll take a look at jQuery and we’ll teach you what you need to know to get you on your way. More specifically, we’ll look at selectors, attributes, working with WCF, jQuery UI, and much more. You could easily walk out of this session wearing a sticker: “I love jQuery”!
14:45- 15:15
Coffee Break
15:15- 16:30
Oh, look at that data: using oData to expose your data over the web (Gill Cleeren)
While applications, sites, tools all generate tons of useful data, it is sometimes
hard to access that data from your own application. To increase the shared value of
data, Microsoft has introduced the Open Data protocol. Using Open Data, we can expose
any data source as a web-friendly data feed.
In this session, we'll start by looking at oData, to make sure that everyone is on
board with all the concepts. We'll see how it adds value for the developer and the
end user for many of Microsoft's products and services. We'll then look at how we
can build our own oData services using WCF Data Services, from working with the basic
concepts to more advanced features such as query interceptors and service operations.
Come and learn about information and entity services that are stunning in their simplicity!
16:30- 17:30
Closing drink
Yesterday, I did another webinar for SilverlightShow titled “Building a Silverlight application end-to-end”. During the presentation (which took about 90 minutes), we had over 200 people attending which was great!
The goal of the presentation was giving an overview of topics that developers will encounter when building real world applications with the Silverlight platform:
A video will be available shortly, meanwhile, you can already download the slides
and demos here:
Slides - Demos
Yesterday, I got to do my very first presentation ever at TechEd Europe. The title of the session was "What you as an ASP.NET developer need to know about jQuery". The focus of the talk was of course jQuery and where it can be used in combination with the ASP.NET platform, both WebForms and ASP.NET MVC. More specifically, I covered the following topics:
Why jQuery?
jQuery fundamentals
Creating and manipulating elements
Events
Animations and effects
Talking to the server
jQuery UI
Writing plugins
Breaking news around new releases
Using the CDN
The room was full with over 350 attendees and I got some great feedback. Thanks to all people that visited my talk, really appreciated.
As promised, here are the slides and ALL the demos (including the ones I did not talk
about in the session):
Slides
Demos
Now that PDC10 is over and after rumors (mostly because people saw “things” in an article that weren’t there at all by the way), Microsoft has officially made clear to the world that it is fully committed to Silverlight, that it keeps investing heavily in the platform, that there will be future versions, that Belgium finally has a government (got you there ;) ) and thus Silverlight is all but dead!
Don’t take it from me of course, but start by reading the statements made by Bob Muglia and Steve Ballmer .
In short, we can easily say (as mentioned in my previous post) and confirm once again that all your investments in Silverlight are safe. If you planned (part of) your career betting on Silverlight, it’s a great bet and one that won’t let you down. In fact, you’ll start seeing more and more return of your investments in the coming time. Take for example Windows Phone 7, which is (almost) here. Over a 1000 (!) apps are already in the store and many more are on their way. Most of them being Silverlight of course!
Back to my statements around HTML5 and Silverlight. Taking a look at the final paragraph
in Bob Muglia’s post:
The purpose of Silverlight has never been to replace HTML, but rather to do the
things that HTML (and other technologies) can’t, and to do so in a way that’s easy
for developers to use. Silverlight enables great client app and media experiences.
As said, Silverlight is aimed at things HTML is not intended for: business apps.
Sites are great with HTML, and can be built with Silverlight. Apps are great with
Silverlight but can be built (most of the time…) with HTML. Each has its function
and they will co-exist.
I really hope that all this clarifies things for everyone, including developers and customers. Should you have questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
Some other interesting articles on this:
(More added later)
I’ve been quite late reading all the buzz that appeared after Mary-Jo Foley wrote an article titled “Microsoft: Our strategy with Silverlight has shifted”. Basically, if you don’t want to read it, it comes down to a few things:
“Silverlight is our development platform for Windows Phone,” he said. Silverlight also has some “sweet spots” in media and line-of-business applications, he said.
But when it comes to touting Silverlight as Microsoft’s vehicle for delivering a cross-platform runtime, “our strategy has shifted,” Muglia told me.
Silverlight will continue to be a cross-platform solution, working on a variety
of operating system/browser platforms, going forward, he said. “But HTML is the only
true cross platform solution for everything, including (Apple’s) iOS platform,” Muglia
said.
Of course, this triggered a lot of reaction and it’s quite funny to follow on Twitter (#silverlight). But more about that in a minute, first some background is in place I guess.
HTML 5 and Silverlight
You won’t hear me denying that HTML5 will be big… some day. While most browsers
are starting to implement HTML5 features, the standard is far far (x100) away. It
could take years before there’s a standard. Years you say? Yes indeed. Years in this
sector is like decades in other industries. That means things will change. Denying
that would be foolish. While betting early is a good thing, there’s something like
too early as well. That said, HTML5, like HTML4 is still a markup language. Yes it
can now create games where dozens of fish swim around (that won’t be my next LOB app
probably but anyway). Yes it has the Canvas and a lot of other goodness. Did I say
it will be great?
On the other hand, we have Silverlight. Today in version 4, so that’s mature. It is today helping thousands of developers building great (LOB) applications (without swimming fish). It will evolve (why wouldn’t it) and there’s no need to wait years for an updated version (Microsoft has released 4 versions of Silverlight in 3 years!), so if changing needs come around, it’s easy to add them to the platform.
And then came PDC2010
While not many where creating an issue out of the fact that several technologies
(Silverlight, Flash, HTML5) were growing steadily next to one another, a few weeks
back, things started to shake a bit and then all of a sudden, PDC2010 came along and
now everyone thinks Microsoft will abandon Silverlight.
In fact, Microsoft is saying that some stuff they previously thought you should do in Silverlight, you should do in HTML5. That’s not a big deal. I’ve always (like many other Silverlight developers) been of the idea that Silverlight should not (in many cases) be used to build entire internet sites with (I haven’t built my blog in Silverlight, did I?). When using Silverlight (and the same goes for Flash here) in internet scenarios, it’s often better to have “islands of Silverlight”, parts of the page in Silverlight that is. Look at what Shawn says here:
Silverlight is good for Apps; HTML is good for sites.
I totally agree. It depends on what you need to build, but that’s just what makes that we need all the technologies, not one! Are you going to build real business apps using JavaScript? OK, you CAN do it (there are some large ones out there, I’ve been on the internet…). But by the time you are done writing your app with JavaScript, I’ll be enjoying some vacation probably, because I could enjoy the strengths of my managed language that sits behind Silverlight.
Also, Microsoft is pushing Silverlight for devices and WP7. It’s brother, WPF, is alive and kicking (although again a small group thinks it’s dead as well).
Where does that leave us now?
If you invested in Silverlight, don’t worry. Silverlight is here today and
it will be here tomorrow as well. Never done any Silverlight yet, well then there’s no
better time to start than now. Silverlight is mature and
can be the next best thing to build your apps with. Learn HTML5 as well, as that will
be big as well. And perhaps, you can combine both to build even better sites
AND apps.
The only thing that changed is how Microsoft positions Silverlight. But we knew that already months ago with the Team Silverlight article: http://team.silverlight.net/announcement/the-future-of-silverlight/ . No one said Microsoft is quitting on Silverlight. Please remember that!
There’s a lot of people trying to put Silverlight in a bad situation. Most of these have no idea what Silverlight is or they are afraid of the power of Silverlight. I do think it’s funny how some magazines also bend the words from MJF’s article even more and come up with titles that are just there to make some more money from their advertising contract (One known site I won't mention by name even deleted my nuanced reply, so far for honest journalism!).
Some other interesting articles:
Feel free to comment (I won’t delete your comment ;-) ) !
Last Monday, I was for the very first time at SDC in The Netherlands, the conference organized by the people behind SDN. I gave 2 presentations there, you can download the slides and demos below.
Silverlight 4 Tour de Force with a little WPF 4 sauce on top: Slides – Demos
Silverlight 4 Tips and tricks: Slides – Demos
The upcoming PDC, which starts tomorrow, is probably the most unique one ever. While there are only a 1000 attendees possible AND the event is taking place in Redmond, more people than even will be able to watch it live. This is truly the first world-wide PDC.
If you want to watch the keynote live, you can do so using http://bit.ly/akeK7Q .
Also, you can join us at the Microsoft building where we are holding a local PDC event
(Visug and Microsoft). Still a few seats open here so register if you want to join
via EventDetail.aspx-EventID=1032463933&Culture=en-US .
More on PDC here in the coming days of course!
Light up your Silverlight skills with the all-new Global Silverlight Firestarter!
What is the Silverlight Firestarter?
- An Event: A one day, global, live streamed and on demand event keynoted by Scott Guthrie
- Training: New self-paced labs and walk through videos
- Interactive: Got questions? Get your answers! Watch live and ask the Silverlight product team questions during the event.
- Why Silverlight? Silverlight is Microsoft’s strategic development platform for building interactive applications across desktop, phone, and the browser.
Something for Everyone
- Just starting out with Silverlight? Watch our On-Ramp sessions and work on hands on labs to get you started.
- Already Building business applications? Watch the event live and learn how to create compelling business applications with Silverlight.
- Got questions? Engage with the Silverlight product team live or in person with our interactive chat.
When
Register
How Much?
December 2, 2010 8am to 5pm PT
Register Online, Now!
Nothing! This is a free event
After the live event keep fueling the fire!
Dive deeper with additional hands on labs and videos that build on the live session content, accelerating you ahead of the crowd.
- Watch the entire event on demand!
- Plus, new self-paced labs and walk through videos
- On Ramp Labs (100 level)
- Building Better Business Apps (200-300 level)
- Turnabout is fair play! Watch a video of our experts doing the labs themselves.
F I R E S T A R T E R L I V E A G E N D A
8:00 am
Silverlight Firestarter Keynote
Scott Guthrie
9:00 am
Masterful Data Strategies with Silverlight and WP7
Jesse Liberty
10:00 am
15 minute break
10:15 am
Roll Out Your Business Apps Today with RIA Services
Pete Brown
11:15 am
MVVM: Why and How? Tips and Patterns using MVVM and Service Patterns
John Papa
12:15 pm
Lunch break
1:00 pm
Silverlight Today and Tomorrow (Special Guest Panel)
Panel
1:30 pm
Building Real World Silverlight Apps
Tim Heuer
2:30 pm
15 minute break
2:45 pm
Tune Your Application: Profiling and Performance Tips
Mike Cook & Jossef Goldberg
3:45 pm
Killer Performance Tips for Silverlight Windows Phone 7
Jaime Rodriguez
After Party!
Spread the Word!
- Blog and tweet to spread the word about the Firestarter!
- Ask people to add the Twitter hash tag #slfs10 to their tweets
- Use the banners and blog bling (attached)
Questions
Got questions? Ask slfs@microsoft.com
This Wednesday, on October 27th, I’ll be doing another webinar for SilverlightShow.net. Like always, these are free to attend. The topic for this webinar is “10 Tips in Silverlight”. If you attend, you can win a copy of my book, Silverlight 4 data and services cookbook (which keeps getting great reviews by the way :) ).
The tips that you’ll see are the following:
Registration is free but required, you can register here.
Last week, I did a webcast on MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) for SilverlightShow.net, one of the largest Silverlight communities. The webcast is now online and can be viewed on-demand here.
Haven’t had the chance to attend the Belgian REMIX10 this year? Or you were there but of course could see all the parallel sessions at once? Then, I have the ideal solution for you: all sessions and interviews can now be watched online from www.remix10.be.
Here are my interview and session:
Interview
Session
After some time, I’m glad to announce that the official, world-renowned Silverlight Tour is coming to Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK and more countries, organized byOrdina Belgium. The second thing I’m glad about is that I’ll be the instructor for this training!
The most important link for all this: http://bit.ly/SilverlightTour, where you can find all information, registration and prices. Currently, we have an early bird offering ending in a few weeks for the first batch of sessions.
What is Silverlight Tour?
The Silverlight Tour Workshop is a three-day course on Silverlight 4, given all around the world throughout the USA, Asia and South-America. Ordina will organize the training in several European countries starting Q4 2010.
The training divides the content into three distinct areas: Design, Development and the Server-Side. Students should be able to develop Silverlight 4 applications once attending the workshop. The Workshop is structured with a mix of didactic lessons, demonstrations and hands-on labs.
Each student will leave the workshop having created several small Silverlight applications. This variety of learning techniques will ensure that all students become proficient in the technology quickly and in an exciting way.
Key values of Silverlight Tour
Why Silverlight?
Silverlight is Microsoft's approach to building RIA (Rich Internet Applications). The platform has since its introduction, taken the world by storm. Now at its fourth iteration, Silverlight is ready for building Line-Of-Business applications, building on the strong foundation of .NET.
Now is the time to learn Silverlight! Not only is Microsoft investing heavily in the platform, but Silverlight is also the base for Windows Phone 7, Microsoft's new mobile platform. And with WPF as the desktop variant, you can apply your knowledge on the web, on the desktop and on mobile devices.
The Silverlight Tour can help you achieve the knowledge you need to start building Silverlight applications today!
Our offering
The Silverlight Tour comes in 2 flavors, depending on your Silverlight knowledge.
If you don't have any experience with Silverlight yet, the Silverlight 4 Tour workshop is ideal for you. In this 3 day course, we are starting from scratch, teaching you the foundation for your Silverlight endeavours. After this training, you'll feel comfortable with the technology and can start building your own applications.
If you already have some experience with the platform, or you just followed the Silverlight 4 Tour, we advise you the Advanced Silverlight 4 workshop. In this 2 day training, we'll tackle the more advanced concepts such as MVVM, advanced data access and IOC.
We offer the combined course (Silverlight 4 Tour Workshop + Advanced Silverlight 4
workshop) at a reduced price.
Yesterday, I arrived back home after touring Sweden for a week. I gave presentations in Malmö, Stockholm, Örebro and Götherborg. Each session was attended by a great number of developers, all members of Swenug. The sessions were sponsored by the people at Telerik: at each session, I got to give away some cool prices from Telerik, including in each city a Telerik Ultimate Collection!
Malmo pictures
Stockholm pictures
Örebro pictures
Göthenburg pictures
In the meantime, here are the downloads for the sessions, including all demos and slide decks.
I hope to be back in Sweden very soon! If you have any questions or remarks, please let me know!
I totally forgot to upload these to my blog :)
Anyway, this is the slide deck and the demos for my talks at SiXin (the Silverlight and User Experience user group) in the Netherlands two weeks back.
Yesterday, I gave a presentation at ReMix 2010 in Belgium, the third edition of this annual Microsoft event. My talk, Building an end-to-end Silverlight 4 application – Writing your Christmas Cards with Silverlight, was focused around the new and existing features in Silverlight 4, helping developers building Silverlight Line-Of-Business applications. These included data access, data binding, hardware access, drag and drop, right-clicking, Out-Of-Browser and Trusted applications.
The slide deck can be downloaded here and the entire demo can be found here.
Dear readers, I’m excited to announce the launch of .NET Show, the Belgian podcast for .NET developers. I’ve been working on this project for some time now and today, we are launching the site AND the first episode!
What is .NET Show?
Together with Katrien De Graeve, I’ll be recording podcasts on .NET development (in the broad sense of the word, so everything related to .NET) from now on. Our goal is bringing you in contact with all corners of the Microsoft development stack, from Silverlight to Azure, from COM interop to ALM... In our podcasts, we are focusing (initially at least) on local guests and we will be doing most shows in Dutch. This way, we can differentiate ourselves from the numerous podcasts already available. The topics, while on .NET of course, can be something that the guests has been working on (a professional project, a hobby project), a technology you have been investigating, something you think that can be interesting for others to hear about etc.
The first first episode can be downloaded already. In this first episode, we are talking
with Maarten Balliauw on Windows Azure and the Microsoft cloud strategy in general.
In episode 2, which we’ll put online in the coming week, I’m talking with Pieter Gheysens
on ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) in Visual Studio 2010. And in episode 3,
I’m sitting down with my co-author Kevin Dockx and we will be discussing WCF RIA Services
in real-life projects.
If you are interested in doing a podcast, let me know! Send me a mail at dotnetshow@snowball.be and I’ll contact you. If you have any remarks or questions, send them to that address as well!
So, with that, I hope you’ll enjoy our podcasts! Head over to www.dotnetshow.be where
you can find the first episode. If you want (and I know you will) to subscribe via
iTunes or another podcast downloader, use this link: 
To
add .NET Show to iTunes, go to Advanced – Subscribe to Podcast:
In the window that appears, enter the following URL: http://www.dotnetshow.be/syndication.axd:
.NET Show will now appear in your subscribed podcasts!
I’m happy to announce that Microsoft, Visug and Azug are teaming up to bring you the PDC 2010 event in Belgium! We'll have live-stream of the 2 keynotes, a Windows 7 demo fest and great fun in al all-American style!
Agenda:
17u30 – Welcome and drink
18u00 – 20u - Watch the PDC keynote live stream on big screen
20u – 20u30 – Dinner
20u30 – 21u30 – Demofest
21u30 - 22u30 – Networking
Registration only via this link: https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032463933&Culture=en-US
From October 4th until October 8th, I’ll be touring through Sweden, visiting 4 user groups in 4 cities to do a mini-Silverlight roadshow. During the 4 evenings, I’ll be giving sessions on data-related stuff using Silverlight.
If you’re in the neighborhood (or live in Sweden :) ), you’re welcome to join of course. All events are free and start at 6pm. Here are the details of where I’ll be on which day:
October 4th: Malmö
Registration: http://www.swenug.se/events/skaane-silverlight-4-tour-de
Address:
Cornerstone Malmö,
Norra Vallgatan 100
Malmö
October 6th: Stockholm
Registration: http://www.swenug.se/events/sthlm-silverlight-4-tour-de
Address:
.Net Akademien
Dalagatan 100
STOCKHOLM
October 7th: Örebro
Registration: http://www.swenug.se/events/oerebro-silverlight-4-tour-de
Address:
Cityconferencecenter
Klostergatan 23
Örebro
October 8th: Göteborg
Registration: http://www.swenug.se/events/gbg-silverlight-4-tour-de
Address:
Sigma
Lindholmspiren 9
Göteborg
I hope to meet you there!
In April, I was in the UK for speaking at the VBUG conference and I was impressed by a demo given by Josh Twist. He built using MEF and WPF a “marketplace” application. The goal of the application was mainly showing the dynamic capabilities of adding new functionality to an application through MEF (or in full, the Managed Extensibility Framework for Silverlight 4).
For a presentation I’m giving shortly, I rebuilt something similar but in Silverlight: the MEF Marketplace in Silverlight. The setup is the following: a user gets an overview of apps he purchased in the market place and can run these on demand. The market place app will download the applications available to the user after the application has started, so this app mainly is a hosting shell for the other ‘purchased” applications to run in. Of course, the sample is a demo and can be extended quite a lot. For example, in the current implementation, I hard-coded the list of purchased apps and there’s no option to buy new ones. Also, it could be extended so that when new apps are purchased, a duplex service notifies the client of this and MEF downloads the new app in the background.
But, instead of talking of what could be added, let’s take a look at what I currently built already! Here’s a screenshot of the application showing the "purchased” applications.
And here’s one of the apps (the Flickr Image search) running inside the "market place shell”.
Time for some code. Let’s begin with the market place itself.
I defined a contract interface for all applications that can be loaded in the market place, IMarketPlaceApplication.
public
interface IMarketPlaceApplication
{
string ApplicationName
{ get; }
FrameworkElement MarketPlaceIcon { get; }
FrameworkElement MainView { get; }
}
A very easy application that will be possible to load from MEF is the HelloWorldApplication. The project structure of this app is as follows:
As you can see, there’s a class called HelloWorldApplication, which implements the IMarketPlaceApplication and 2 xaml files. The HelloWorldApplication code is shown below:
[Export(typeof(IMarketPlaceApplication))]publicclass HelloWorldApplication: IMarketPlaceApplication
{#region IMarketPlaceApplication
Memberspublicstring ApplicationName
{ get { return"Hello
MEF world"; }}
[Import(typeof(Icon))]public FrameworkElement
MarketPlaceIcon {get;
set;
}
[Import(typeof(HelloWorldView))]public FrameworkElement
MainView {get;
set;
}
#endregion}
This is our first encounter with MEF. The first line uses the Export attribute. This class is saying that it is available for someone to use, when someone requests an instance of IMarketPlaceApplication. A bit further, we are using the Import attribute on both the MarketPlaceIcon and the MainView. Here we are saying: MEF, search us a class that’s exporting itself as type Icon and HelloWorldView respectively.
These 2 latter instances will be inserted by MEF upon executing the application, that is, if MEF finds the corresponding export. These exports can be found in the 2 XAML files (in the code-behind). The HelloWorldView.xaml.cs code is shown next. Note the Export attribute: we’re telling to MEF that this type can be used where an Import is requested of the HelloWorldView type.
[Export]
publicpartialclass HelloWorldView : UserControl
{public HelloWorldView() {InitializeComponent();
}
}
The Icon.xaml.cs is pretty similar code-behind-wise (I think I invented that term here): here alse we are adding an Export attribute.
[Export]
publicpartialclass Icon : UserControl
{public Icon() {InitializeComponent();
}
}
The HelloWorldApplication is at this point a stand-alone application (it compiles to its own XAP file), but we’ll now build the Market Place shell that will host this app. The code download at the end of the article contains several sample applications (a Flickr app and a Facebook app).
Similar to a real market place application, our implementation will get a list of apps you purchased previously. Only these are available to you and will be shown. To get this list, I wrote a basic Silverlight-enabled WCF service that fetches this list of available applications. This service is hosted in this case in the hosting website. The code below shows this service, which in this case returns a hard-coded list of apps (note that I have some more apps already added here).
[ServiceContract(Namespace = "")][AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode =
AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)]
publicclass MarketPlaceService
{[OperationContract]
public List<MefApplication>
GetAvailableApplicationsForUser() {returnnew List<MefApplication>()
{new MefApplication(){ApplicationName="Flickr Image Search",
XapFileName="FlickImageSearch.xap"}, new MefApplication(){ApplicationName="Hello World",
XapFileName="HelloWorldApplication.xap"},new MefApplication(){ApplicationName="MEFacebook",
XapFileName="FacebookApplication.xap"}};
}
//
Add more operations here and mark them with [OperationContract]}
[DataContract]
publicclass MefApplication
{[DataMember]
publicstring ApplicationName { get; set; }
[DataMember]
publicstring XapFileName { get; set; }
}
The service uses the MefApplication class as a helper class: it contains the name of the application and more importantly, the name of the XAP file (this could easily be replaced with a Uri to the XAP file).
In the MefMarketPlace, the Silverlight Market Place application, we can create a web reference to this service. In the App.xaml.cs, I add a call to a new method, DownloadMyApplicationList():
privatevoid Application_Startup(object sender, StartupEventArgs e)
{DownloadMyApplicationsList();
this.RootVisual = new MainPage();
}
This new method makes the service call to get a list of available XAPs that I can use (apps that I purchased).
void DownloadMyApplicationsList(){ AggregateCatalog = new AggregateCatalog();container = new CompositionContainer(this.AggregateCatalog);
CompositionHost.Initialize(container);
MarketPlaceService.MarketPlaceServiceClient client =
new MarketPlaceService.MarketPlaceServiceClient();client.GetAvailableApplicationsForUserCompleted +=
new EventHandler<MarketPlaceService.GetAvailableApplicationsForUserCompletedEventArgs>(client_GetAvailableApplicationsForUserCompleted);
client.GetAvailableApplicationsForUserAsync();
}
void client_GetAvailableApplicationsForUserCompleted(object sender,
MarketPlaceService.GetAvailableApplicationsForUserCompletedEventArgs e)
{if (e.Error == null)
{AvailableApplicationsForUser = e.Result;
InitializeCatalog();
}
}
In the callback method of the service, I call InitializeCatalog(). MEF has the concept of Catalogs: a Catalog can be used to tell MEF where it has to look for Parts. Several types of catalogs exist in MEF for Silverlight: the TypeCatalog, the AssemblyCatalog, the DeploymentCatalog and the AggregateCatalog. A TypeCatalog basically allows us to register a specific type with MEF: if I want MEF to know about a certain Export, I can register it in a TypeCatalog. An AssemblyCatalog tells MEF to look for parts in a specific assembly. The DeploymentCatalog allows us to specify a XAP file and MEF will look in the assemblies therein for parts. It also allows us to asynchronously download a XAP file. An AggregateCatalog can contain any number of other catalogs and more catalogs can be added at any time.
By default, if we don’t specify a Catalog for our application, MEF looks at the current XAP file and for each assembly it finds, it creates an AssemblyCatalog. It then combines these with an AggregateCatalog. That means that we can omit creating a catalog in our application: in this case, MEF will create a default one for us, with something similar to this code:
void InitializeCatalog(){ AggregateCatalog catalog = new AggregateCatalog();foreach (var deployedPart in Deployment.Current.Parts)
{StreamResourceInfo resourceInfo =
Application.GetResourceStream(new Uri(deployedPart.Source,
UriKind.Relative));Assembly assembly = deployedPart.Load(resourceInfo.Stream);
catalog.Catalogs.Add(new AssemblyCatalog(assembly));}
CompositionHost.Initialize(catalog);
}
Back to our application. If we look at the available catalogs in MEF, we can see that the DeploymentCatalog is a good candidate for what we need: we can use it to download a XAP file (the application that we want to load). After that, we can add each DeploymentCatalog to an AggregateCatalog. MEF will then make these available in our application and we can run the downloaded applications.
In code, this gives the following:
private CompositionContainer
container;void InitializeCatalog(){foreach (var item in AvailableApplicationsForUser)
{DeploymentCatalog deploymentCatalog =
new DeploymentCatalog(item.XapFileName);this.AggregateCatalog.Catalogs.Add(deploymentCatalog);deploymentCatalog.DownloadCompleted += (s, e) =>
{//extend
to give meaningful error handlingif (e.Error != null)
MessageBox.Show(e.Error.Message);
};
deploymentCatalog.DownloadAsync();
}
container.ComposeParts(this);}
You can see that I use a CompositionContainer here. The container is well, like the word says it, a container where MEF puts all the parts, shakes it up and creates/composes parts.
We now have the code that runs when we start the application: it gets a list of all the applications we can use over the service and then it downloads the XAP files of these apps asynchronously. Each XAP file is downloaded using a DeploymentCatalog and these are added to an AggregateCatalog. This now makes our downloaded applications available to run.
Let’s now take a look at the UI where we’ll run the apps from. The following screenshot shows the UI:
The “Load my apps'” button on the top right will execute a command on the viewmodel that will load all available applications in the ListBox on the left.
When clicking on the “Load app” button, the selected application (here the Flickr app) is loaded:
Clicking the “Home” button unloads the app and returns us to the list screen.
The complete XAML listing can be found in the code download. The most important part is shown below. Note that there’s a ContentPresenter used here and it’s bound to the MainView property of the SelectedApplication. The latter is a property exposed on the viewmodel (see further). If no view/app is selected, this ContentPresenter won’t be visible and we’ll see the default UI again.
<Gridx:Name="LayoutRoot"Background="Black">
<Grid.RowDefinitions>
<RowDefinitionHeight="*"></RowDefinition>
<RowDefinitionHeight="60"></RowDefinition>
</Grid.RowDefinitions>
<Grid>
...
</Grid>
<ContentPresenterContent="{Binding SelectedApplication.MainView}">
</ContentPresenter>
<ButtonGrid.Row="1"Content="Home"Margin="10"Background="#FFABE3FF"
Command="{Binding HomeCommand}"BorderBrush="#FF00AAFF"
Style="{StaticResource ButtonStyle1}"
Width="130"Height="40"HorizontalAlignment="Center"
VerticalAlignment="Center"></Button>
</Grid>
Time to look at the viewmodel now. Probably the most important part here is the ObservableCollection<IMarketPlaceApplication>:
[ImportMany(AllowRecomposition=true)]public ObservableCollection<IMarketPlaceApplication>
Applications{get
{return _applications;}
}
The ListBox in the UI is bound to this collection and since it’s an ObservableCollection, the UI will reflect changes to this collection. That’s important here, since the list of available apps won’t be known after the shell contacted the service. Note that the collection property is attributed with the ImportMany attribute. This is a sign for MEF that more than one part that is exposing itself with the same Export attribute (same type) is allowed. By default, this isn’t allowed since MEF wouldn’t know which one to use. Here, we want the ImportMany since we know that more than one app will be available and they all need to be exported as an IMarketPlaceApplication. Another important thing to note here is the AllowRecomposition option we used here. AllowRecomposition tells MEF that if during the run of the app more Exports become available for this Import, it’s OK to add them, in other words, to rebuild the composition.
The ContentPresenter in the UI bound to SelectedApplication.MainView. The SelectedApplication property is shown next.
private IMarketPlaceApplication
_selectedApplication;public IMarketPlaceApplication
SelectedApplication {get
{return _selectedApplication;}
set
{ _selectedApplication = value; NotifyPropertyChanged("SelectedApplication");}
}
NotifyPropertyChanged is a simple method that raises the PropertyChanged event of the INotifyPropertyChanged interface.
privatevoid NotifyPropertyChanged(string p)
{if (PropertyChanged != null)
{PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(p));
}
}
The “Load apps” button in the UI is bound to the LoadAppsCommand. I use the MVVM Light RelayCommand here. In the execute code of the ICommand, I ask MEF to satisfy the Imports of the current class (the viewmodel). This basically tells MEF to look at the catalogs and bring all the Export(typeof(IMarketPlaceApplication)) into the ImportMany.
public RelayCommand
LoadAppsCommand{get
{if (_loadAppsCommand == null)
{ _loadAppsCommand = new RelayCommand(() =>
{ CompositionInitializer.SatisfyImports(this); loaded = true;},
() =>
{if (loaded)returnfalse;
returntrue;
}
);
}
return _loadAppsCommand;}
}
The LoadSelectedApplicationCommand and the HomeCommand respectively set the SelectedApplication property to the selected application in the list or null.
public RelayCommand<IMarketPlaceApplication>
LoadSelectedAppCommand{get
{if (_loadSelectedAppCommand == null)
{ _loadSelectedAppCommand = new RelayCommand<IMarketPlaceApplication>((a) =>
{ SelectedApplication = a;
}
);
}
return _loadSelectedAppCommand;}
}
public RelayCommand
HomeCommand{get
{if (_homeCommand == null)
{ _homeCommand = new RelayCommand(() =>
{ SelectedApplication = null;}
);
}
return _homeCommand;}
}
With that, we have successfully implemented the MEF Marketplace. As said in the very beginning, this can be extended quite a lot. Add a duplex service and a buying system that pushes a message to the client and trigger the client to download the linked XAP file is a nice way to start. The complete file can be downloaded below.
Enjoy!
Code download: MefMarketPlace.zip (868.99 KB)
Last month, together with my “writing-buddy” Kevin Dockx, we wrote an article on Silverlight LOB development for TechNet Magazine. I noticed that it was published today on the TechNet site for reading as well as in printed format in the TechNet Magazine.
Interested? Read it here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ff955754.aspx .
I was looking at Amazon today and noticed that there were now already 12 reviews on our (Kevin and myself) book, giving the book a whopping 5 star rating, which is of course great!
Here are some of the excerpts:
Ideal for those who prefer a tutorial-oriented writing style, August 30, 2010 
HOW THIS COOKBOOK WORKED FOR ME: In contrast, this book ("Microsoft Silverlight 4
Data and Services Cookbook" from PACKT) certainly proved valuable to me by appealing
to my learning style, and delivering what was advertised on the cover. I was able
to learn a reasonable amount of SL4 specifically for handling business data, using
"Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook". The format and approach is ideal
for those among us who prefer to "cut to the chase" instead of wading through lengthy
tirades. The examples build on one another which served to reinforce key concepts
through out the book-- money well spent from my perspective.
Great Book for Silverlight App Development, June 22, 2010
*Getting ready
*How to do it...
*How it works...
*There's more...
*See also
The ample pictures of both the Visual Studio 2010 GUI and running Silverlight applications
augment the many code samples. The section that I have appreciated the most has been
the chapter on "Talking to WCF RIA Services" as I am working on developing a better
understanding of it.
Now that the summer is here, it's a great time to pick up a book or two to read when
you're away from your computer. If you are building or want to build applications
with Silverlight, I highly recommend this book and suggest that you get a copy for
your summer reading.
Best book for Developers., July 18, 2010
Best book for beginner / intermediate developers who have prior knowledge about basics
of Silverlight.
Best Silverlight 4 Book To Date, June 19, 2010
I have read through every well-known Silverlight 4 book on the market. I have even
read part of Microsoft Step by Step Silverlight 4 (released yesterday 2010-06-18 on
Safari and via ebook) - In my humble opinion, this is the best Silverlight 4 book
on the market to date. Most of what I have read from the other Silverlight books is
covered in Ian Griffith's Silverlight 4 labs up on the Microsoft Silverlight 4 page.
If you want a fast track to learn Silverlight 4 and are already familiar with C# .NET,
I would recommend picking up a top rated Silverlight 3 book (I personally like books
from the Apress series - "Pro Silverlight 3" and the Silverlight 3 Business Intelligence
one (forget the exact title) - then the labs on the official Silverlight 4 website
and this book.
life savor, August 25, 2010
I had to write a web-application to demo the WCF Data Service I was writing on a very
short time budget. This book was a life savor; it had all the answers I needed for
consuming the service and displaying in the datagrid. For server side programming,
both Effective REST Services and Essential WCF are great.
The best silverlight book i've seen..., 24 Aug 2010
This is an excellent book, packed with step by step exercises so you learn by doing
rather than just having reading a book as thick as a house brick. Personally I would
buy this book to learn Silverlight from scratch, while its true you wont learn a great
deal about the controls but you WILL learn the most important aspects which are accessing
and displaying data.
I've been a software developer for 6 years after University and bought so many IT
books, so far, this has been the best and most readable. I enjoyed reading and practicing
the examples in it unlike so many 20 inch thick programming beasts that you dread
opening because they just send you to sleep!
Dont hesitate, just buy it.
My only gripe about this book is that when I brought it I thought it was a tad expensive
at £35... But, worth it though.
Concise and relevant, 11 Aug 2010
This book covers the essentials of Silverlight and WPF with practical examples that
you are going to follow when building your real world applications. It explains WPF
binding and DataTemplates well, and what interfaces your business layer objects need
to implement to notify when changes occur.
The recipies on WCF communication (sockets, WCF, net.tcp) are great and give examples
of when you would best use them, and cover the config file changes needed too.
A refreshingly slim book too - lets face it, who wants a 1000+ page book covering
everything and the kitchen sink. You want a straight to the point book that covers
the essentials you would use at work and touches all the major areas. Highly recommended.
If you want to read more reviews or order my Silverlight 4 Data and services cookbook, head to Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk or alternatively you can order via the Packt website as well!
Yesterday, I gave a talk for DotNed.nl, the Dutch usergroup at the Ordina offices in Nieuwegein. 55 people attended the sold-out talk, I hope you enjoyed it. Any feedback is of course welcome via mail.
The talk, Building an end-to-end Silverlight application consisted out of 10 topics that we often encounter when building LOB applications:
The ZIP file below contains the PPTX and the demos (also of the 2 topics we didn’t cover).
Remember that in 2 weeks, on September 14th, I’ll be again in the Netherlands for 2 sessions for SiXin, the Silverlight usergroup. Registration for this event is free and can be done here.
Mark Tuesday 28th in your calendar, as it will be the day that we have the third edition of ReMix in Belgium.
With this third edition we continue our tradition to invite thought-leaders of design and web who show us their craft. In addition you can take the opportunity to discover how newer ways of working might enable you and your organization to be more productive in translating ideas into Web. Discover how you can prototype your design with SketchFlow and Expression Blend, how Silverlight 4 and Silverlight for Windows Phone make it easy to deliver the experience, and discover the near future of Internet Explorer and HTML5, all of them allowing you to innovatively design and develop for the Cloud. Because after all, We're all in!
REMIX10 has a User Experience and a Web Developer track with eight sessions ranging from pure inspirational UX content to Web developer sessions thus marrying the best of both worlds: Make Web Not War.
I will be giving a session at ReMix as well. I can say that this will be a very special talk, you really need to come and see it. The abstract is the following:
Building a Silverlight 4 Application End to End
When you’re asked to build a new Silverlight application from scratch, it may be a
bit hard to know where to start exactly. What would you say if you spend 75 minutes
of your day and I show you the steps involved in creating a complete business application?
Sounds neat, doesn’t it?! In the scenario, we are following a company that wants to
set up a campaign site in Silverlight 4 that makes it possible to send Christmas cards.
Among others, we’ll be spending some time with printing and webcam interaction, data
binding, COM interop, out-of-browser features and data service access. Indeed, Christmas
does come early this year!
Interested? Join the conference for free: http://msdn.microsoft.com/nl-be/ff923221.aspx. See you there!
With this campaign, they want to put the people that are in the IT-trenches every day on a stand. I registered myself as well, so if you think that the community work I do (Visug, Community Day, my blog, sessions…) is worth a vote, click on me on this page: http://www.heldenvanit.be/nl/profiel/gill-cleeren
Thanks!
hNext week Thursday (August 26th 2010), I’ll be presenting at DotNed.nl. The presentation is titled Building an end-to-end Silverlight 4 application. As the title says, we’ll be looking at some of the common questions (and of course answers) you’ll have when you are faced with the challenge of building a Line-of-Business application from scratch.
Bring your demo hat today, as we’ll be building an end-to-end, real life Silverlight application during this session! Looking at Silverlight today, we easily see that the platform is getting larger and larger, with more frameworks such as MEF being developed on the side. Advanced features such as COM interop and printing make the Silverlight story complete. In this session, we’ll take a look at how we can use all members of the Silverlight family to build an end-to-end application, based on MVVM principles.
Registration is free but mandatory and can be done on the DotNed.nl site. And since it’s taking place in the Ordina.NL offices, I won’t be feeling all that strange ;-) (FYI, I work at Ordina.BE!)
Today, I gave a webinar for the readers of SilverlightShow. The video recording will be online soon. You can get the slides and demo from here.
Have you been wondering, like me, why the Find and Replace window in Visual Studio 2010 is always so large? I’ve been thinking: “I really can’t remember making it so wide myself?!?!”
Well, the good thing: you (and me for that matter) aren’t going mad, we’ve just hit the most reported bug on Connect. The Find and Replace window grows 16 pixels every time you use it. Take a look below at what happens when doing CTRL-SHIFT-F several times in a row!
Luckily, there’s now a patch released for this, which can be obtained here: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=30518&wa=wsignin1.0
Yesterday, I was walking in Antwerp and several shops such as Fnac and MediaMarkt had big displays that the iPad had arrived. I had already “played” with a device a few months back, so no need to take another look at it now.
What I did do, was watching from a distance to the people looking at device: mostly kids were playing some game on the machine. I wonder if that’s were Apple is going with the device: a gaming-device at an incredible (high) price. It’s a consumer device, and I see little potential for it in the enterprise world. I can be wrong, but that’s how I see it at this moment.
Yes, I know they have sold quite a lot of them (Steve B. mentioned it also just last week), but do keep in mind that Apple is doing *everything* to make people think: “I need one of those to be part of it again”.
I’m convinced that a Windows device in the same form factor has a lot more potential. It has the usual things you’d expect from a PC: it runs Flash/Silverlight, you can run your applications on it, you’ll be able to upgrade to Windows 8 some day… I got a reaction from someone on Twitter, saying that Windows 7 is not touch-friendly and that it’s focused on mouse/keyboard. While that is true, keep in mind that Windows 7 has touch built-in to the platform.
What really will make these machines capable, is a UI shell. Everyone knows HTC Sense probably: it’s a graphical layer HTC puts on top of Windows Mobile to give it a more capable touch experience, easy access to applications and the like. When Windows 7 tablets will be coming out and they will have some shell running on it, they can offer an experience similar to iOS. On top of that, you can actually use the device for doing useful things as well, because all your software, mouse-enabled or touch-enabled will work on it. Or, of course, develop your own software for it!
One of these shells was shown today (via Engadget): UICentric, and it will appear on a Windows tablet coming out this year. You can see it running here.
(Btw, before someone asks/says: Yes, I have an iPhone since my Sony XPeria WinMobile 6.1 is broken. While I find it rather good, it crashes a few times a week and gets quite hot after long calls. It'll be out of the door when I have a Windows Phone 7 though :) )
I’m really busy preparing to speak at several conferences and events in the fall. The first upcoming event is a webinar I’m doing for SilverlightShow:
August 19th, 2010, 10:00 am PDT (
see
your local time
)
Speaker: Gill Cleeren
Building enterprise applications with Silverlight almost begs for rich data binding
features. While Silverlight 2 already had an extended set of features available to
enable data binding, Silverlight 3 and 4 add on these and extend the databinding platform.
In this webinar, we’ll start with a complete overview of the data binding features
Silverlight 4 has to offer. We’ll take a look at how data binding is the enabler for
applying the MVVM (ViewModel) pattern and commanding as well. Finally, we’ll open
Blend and see its support for data binding, including the use of design-time data.
You can register here (it’s free).
I’ve been writing some guest articles on SilverlightShow.net in the past couple of weeks. The articles give a complete overview of the current situation of performing duplex communication in Silverlight.
Article 1: The duplex story: looking at duplex communication in Silverlight 4 (Part 1): in this article, I’m giving a full overview of the HttpPollingDuplexBinding in Silverlight 4. This binding can be used to create duplex communication over HTTP.
Article 2: The duplex story: looking at duplex communication in Silverlight 4 - Part 2: Using Sockets: in this second part, I’m taking a look at sockets and how to create super-performing, duplex communication with the protocol. I’m taking a look at the changes made in Silverlight 4 as well.
Article 3: The duplex story: looking at duplex communication in Silverlight 4 - Part 3: Using Net.Tcp: in this final part, I’m looking at the newest option that arrived with Silverlight 4.
I hope you enjoy them!
Now that my book is on a roll, it’s time that you start writing a book as well perhaps, no?!
I just got a mail from my publisher, Packt Publishing (and I do really recommend them!) that they are looking for more authors on Silverlight.
Packt invites Silverlight authors and book ideas:
Packt Publishing (www.PacktPub.com), the publisher of computer related books, plans to expand its range of Silverlight books and is currently inviting inquiries from people who fancy writing a Silverlight book. You do not need to have any writing experience to write for Packt. Anyone who loves Silverlight and fancies writing a book can get in touch with Packt at author@packtpub.com with his/her book ideas. Even if you don't have a book idea and are just interested in writing a book, Packt is still keen to talk to you.
Read more details about this opportunity here: http://authors.packtpub.com/content/packt-invites-silverlight-experts-write-new-set-books
So if you’re feeling creative, contact them and maybe in a few months time, you can have that great feeling of holding in your hands that book you wrote yourself!
Microsoft just announced that all of us can help deciding which sessions will be delivered at Tech-Ed 2010 Berlin. That's a great way of making sure that the contents is what the public wants!
I've ran through the list and 4 of my proposals made the shortlist (which is good news :)).
If you would like me to deliver one of these sessions on the upcoming Tech-Ed, please vote for them at http://europe.msteched.com/sessionpreference . Of course, there are many really other interesting sessions there as well: I'm sure this will be a great conference!
Thanks for voting!
A few weeks ago, Microsoft released the Visual Studio Pro Power Tools, a free set of enhancements and features for Visual Studio 2010. There seems to be a small issue (it’s not really correct to call it a bug) with one of the shortcuts that it adds in combination with a Belgian keyboard layout (which is Azerty).
On the tools download page, you can read the following about the added Align Assignments feature:
Align Assignments
This extension is useful for making your code a little more readable by aligning the
assignments when you type Ctrl+Alt+] such that it takes this:
And turns it into this:
On an Azerty keyboard, AltGr is used to type the square bracket. No issue there (yet).
The issue appears however when typing an array instantiation:
int []
array = newint]
As you can see, I *wanted* to type new int[], but the opening bracket failed, because of the added shortcut. Instead, the code wants to perform the Align Assignments command. This is a clash of shortcuts that I guess only appears on Azerty keyboard layouts.
The solution is either changing or removing the shortcut for this command, as shown in the image below:
Last week, I gave 2 sessions at NDC 2010 (Norwegian Developer Conference) in Oslo. I was glad that I was asked by the organization to be part of this conference that is known for its long list of renowned speakers. Here are my impressions of the conference as well as the downloads I promised in my sessions.
Conference report
Oslo is a really nice city. I mean really nice. People are friendly, the city is very
clean and apparently, it houses a lot of great developers too.
NDC 2010 took place this year from June 16th until June 18th in the Oslo Spectrum. The Spectrum is a large event center, comparable to the Sportpaleis in Belgium. For me, it was the first time I’ve been to a conference that was organized in this type of center. I was at first wondering whether this would be handy to attend and give sessions in. Well, it works great ?. You have a great view of the session contents because of the screens being high in the rooms while you can still see the speaker very good as well. While giving my sessions, I was still able to have interaction with and see the audience. The organization of the event itself was done as it should as well. So for the conference and infrastructure, a big thumbs up!
While infrastructure is one thing, content of sessions is much more important. One of the reasons I was really looking forward coming to this event as a speaker, as I mentioned in the intro, is that it is filled with top speakers for a developer audience Also, I got to hang out with a great number of fellow RDs. Names included Juval Löwy, Michelle Bustamente, Ingo Rammer, Richard Campbell, Carl Franklin, Tim Heuer, Billy Hollis, Rob Conery, Greg Young, Robert Martin and I’m forgetting a whole lot at this point. This is a formula for success: the Norwegians surely know how to “entertain” a developer crowd.
All in all, NDC is a really nice conference that is now on my list of yearly-must-attend events! Congrats on job well done to the people of Programutvikeling (I hope I’m spelling it right, my Norwegian is even after a week still horrible).
Session downloads
Here are the links for downloads for both my sessions:
Silverlight
4 Data Access and Services not for the faint of heart
ASP.NET 4 Caching: Performance for free
If you have any questions or remarks, please send me a mail!
At Community Day 2010, together with Bart Wullems, I gave a session called Building an enterprise application with Silverlight and NHibernate. You can download the slide deck and demo below:
The day after… finally!
Although I look forward to Community day almost as much as Christmas every year, I’m always happy when it is over as well. The main reason for being happy is of course that everything went great! All sessions were of excellent quality, we had more attendees once again, no unforeseen things happened (apart from an empty microphone battery which is really nothing…) and the catering seemed to be really appreciated!
A quick search on Twitter for #ComDay2010 resulted in reactions such as the following:
Thanks for a great #comday2010 at @gillcleeren and all the other organisers! Great job! about 20 hours ago via HootSuite
had a blast at #comday2010 today! Great atmosphere, great food & sessions. CU next edition!
Had a great time at #comday2010 : great sessions and won an xna unleashed in the end. Seems I have to develop games in the future :-)
On the way home after a verry interesting #comday2010
#comday2010 The food was much better than last year!
#comday2010 Props to the organisation! It's been great!
Another great event, Community day 2010 is almmost finished. good work from all, congrats! #comday2010
Here are some pictures, more will be available soon:
With my book I wrote together with Kevin Dockx, Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbookavailable for a couple of weeks now, I decided to do a small search on reviews. I’ll be honest, I took all I could find right now.
Here’s the ones I found:
Richard Costall:
“Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook is a great publication, and worthy of a place any Silverlight developers bookshelf. The formula of ‘recipes’ works well, with well explained, yet simple examples covering almost everything you’d ask when starting out building business applications in Silverlight. It highlights Silverlight 2 and Silverlight 3 functionality differences, yet is right up to date on Silverlight 4.”
Complete review at: http://www.nxtgenug.net/Article.aspx?ArticleID=368
Vikram Pendse writes:
“My Review Comments : * * * * * (5 Stars)..Simple Amazing book !..Go and Grab your Copy Today !!! :)
Impressed with this Book?..want to have a look at? Ok ! What you see is what you get ! kidding..You can download a sample chapter right away !”
Complete review at http://pendsevikram.blogspot.com/2010/05/microsoft-silverlight-4-data-and.html
Damir Tomicic writes:
“Das Buch ist sehr praktisch geschrieben. Der Leser merkt sofort, dass Gill und Kevin die Ansätze selbst ausprobiert und für die Leser optimiert haben. Die gewählte Sprache ist einfach, die Beispiele auch für Anfänger geeignet. Ein guter Einstieg in das Thema.”
Complete review at: http://tomicic.de/2010/05/05/MicrosoftSilverlight4DataAndServicesCookbookGillcleeren.aspx
Review on Amazon.com
“Good Introduction to the Datagrid, Dataform, and different Services (4/5)”
Complete review at http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Silverlight-Data-Services-Cookbook/product-reviews/1847199844/ref=dp_db_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1
Interested in my book as well? It is available from Packt Publishing, Amazon.com, Amazon UK and many other retailers as well! I hope you enjoy it!
Community Day 2010 is coming! Registration is now open.
No less than fourteen Microsoft user groups combine their efforts to organize this
unique knowledge-sharing and networking event. With so many new Microsoft
product and technology releases, the content of this Community Day will
be focusing on Visual Studio 2010, SharePoint 2010, Silverlight 4, Office 2010, SQL
Server 2008 R2, OCSR2, and many more!
So don’t miss out on the Community Day and join us on Thursday June 24th in
Utopolis, Mechelen. We will bring together more than 300 IT Pro’s and developers.
The Community Day 2010 is brought to you by Azug, Besug, Biwug, IT-Talks Pro-Exchange,
SCUG, SQLUG, VBIB, Visug, WinSec, XNA-BUG, CLUG, MyTIC and DotNetHub.
Register now for free at www.communityday.be !
Earlier today, I got confirmation that my first book I wrote (together with Kevin Dockx) has been published and can now be ordered, both in e-book and hard copy. This is the new cover. The book also marks the launch of the new brand of Packt, namely Packt Enterprise.
The e-book version is available from the publisher’s website: https://www.packtpub.com/microsoft-silverlight-4-data-and-services-cookbook/book . On this site, you can also get a discount on the printed version.
You can also buy the book from Amazon of course (which at this moment still lists it as pre-order though). If you shop at Amazon.com, you can get your copy here: http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Silverlight-Data-Services-Cookbook/dp/1847199844. If you rather order at Amazon UK, you can order here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Microsoft-Silverlight-Data-Services-Cookbook/dp/1847199844/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1272289229&sr=8-1.
If you want to get a more in-depth look at what the book has to offer, take a look here: https://www.packtpub.com/microsoft-silverlight-4-data-and-services-cookbook/book#in_detail .
What the book is about:
Silverlight 3 made a big step into Line-Of-Business applications and Silverlight 4 builds further on this. This book is not a general Silverlight 4 overview book; it is uniquely aimed at developers who want to build data-driven applications using Silverlight. It focuses on showing . NET developers how to interact with and handle multiple sources of data in Silverlight business applications and how to solve particular data problems, following a practical hands-on approach, using real-world recipes in a practical cookbook format. The book is aimed at Silverlight 4, however most of the covered features work both in Silverlight 3 and 4.
By following the practical recipes in this book, you will learn the concepts needed to create data-rich business applications—from the basic creation of a Silverlight application, to displaying data using data binding and upgrading your existing applications to use Silverlight.
Who this book is written for:
If you are a .NET developer who wants to build professional data-driven applications with Silverlight, then this book is for you. Basic Silverlight experience and familiarity with accessing data using ADO.NET in regular .NET applications is required.
What you will learn from this book:
You can also read some sample recipes on the Packt site here: https://www.packtpub.com/article/inserting-updating-deleting-sorting-grouping-displaying-data-grid-silverlight .
I do hope you’ll like the book. If you have any questions on the book, don’t hesitate to mail me at silverlight@snowball.be .
I just noticed that the video of my session on ASP.NET 4.0 at DevDays Netherlands is online. You can watch it here: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/matthijs/Whats-hot-in-ASPNET-40-by-Gill-Cleeren/
After beta’s and one RC release, starting today, we can get our hands on Visual Studio 2010 RTM. Just hours ago, Microsoft held a keynote on the release of their flagship IDE, Visual Studio 2010. This release coincides with the release of .NET 4.0 and of course Silverlight 4, which has its official launch event tomorrow. This marks probably the largest release ever for developers from Microsoft.
I need it badly
Visual Studio 2010 is like honey, developers swarm to it. It’s understandable that
you want to get your hands on the bits. Where can you get them?
If you’re an MSDN subscriber, you’re in luck, as you can get all the bits from the
MSDN subscription site. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions)
If you are not, you have the following options:
Why you need it
If I wanted to make a list of reasons why you should be upgrading to Visual Studio 2010, I would be up all night I think. Since it’s quite late already, I’m going to make an all-but-complete list with my top features that make Visual Studio 2010 an not-to-miss upgrade. (For the complete list – you’re warned, it’s very complete – take a look here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386063(VS.100).aspx)
The IDE looks really stylish!
Upon opening Visual Studio 2010 for the first time, you’ll immediately notice that something happened… Something big. No longer the traditional grey interface, but an exciting new look for the place you spend all your development hours in. Built entirely in WPF, the new shell offers plenty of extension points so you can make it feel even more like home.
New IDE features
I personally like the Navigate To function a lot (I blogged about it yesterday here: Visual Studio 2010 Tip- Navigate to functionality). Another one I like is the zoom in/out we can now do in the code editor. This is a real life-saver when doing demos on stage or when showing someone some code. Simply keep CTRL key pressed and rotate that mouse wheel of yours. For people who work on multiple monitors, Visual Studio now supports this much better!
Some other nice features:
New framework and languages
Visual Studio 2010 comes packed with new releases.
I want more
Not enough reading material for your brain? A free ebook is made available “Moving to Visual Studio 2010” here.
Warnings here!
Something to watch out for: currently, the Windows Phone 7 tools do not work with the RTM version of 2010. Read more on this here: http://forums.silverlight.net/forums/t/175181.aspx
Very often, you need to navigate to a class while coding. Perhaps a class you wrote yourself, perhaps you just want to see the members of a type of the .NET framework.
Visual Studio 2010 has THE ultimate feature for this, namely the Navigate To function. What you do, is hit CTRL + , (yes, indeed the comma) and it will open the Navigate To window, as shown below.
This window follows the same rules as the new IntelliSense: if I’m searching for a property “OverPaid”, I can search by typing Over… or just use OP.
If you have some text already selected in the code editor, the window will perform its search from there.
Are you counting down the days to the Visual Studio 2010 launch as well? I really hope so, as it’s the biggest release for developers EVER! The list of new features is way too long to put in a simple post, so therefore I encourage you to watch the keynote live next week on April 13th 8AM PST (that’s 5PM in the afternoon Belgian time). Click here to add the event straight to your Outlook calendar.
After some behind-the-scenes work, I’m happy to announce that Community Day 2010 will take place on June 24th 2010 in Utopolis Mechelen.
This fourth installment of THE community event of the year will of course focus on all the new technologies that are coming out of Microsoft these months, including Visual Studio 2010, SharePoint 2010, Office 2010, Silverlight 4, .NET 4.0, SQL Server 2008 R2 etc.
New this year is that we have a dedicated track on one specific technology and that will be SharePoint 2010. This track will contain general SharePoint 2010 sessions as well as more specific ones, such as working with Silverlight and SharePoint.
The usergroups are working on the agenda now, I hope to announce the complete agenda around April 25th. Also around that time, we will open the registrations on the site.
For now, check out www.communityday.be. If you are part of a company that wants to join us as a sponsor in organizing this event, send a mail to gillcleeren@gmail.com. An event such as this one can of course only take place because of the ongoing support of sponsors and usergroups.
I hope to meet many of you on June 24th!
PS: we will NOT be serving French Fries again ;-) . We’re working on a great formula to have some really good food this year! More hopefully very soon!
This month, you can meet me at the VBUG Spring Conference 2010 in Birmingham, UK. I’ll be doing a talk on Silverlight 4 and WPF 4.
Here’s more info on the event:
Thursday 29th April 2010
Our Spring Conference this year has the theme VBUG4Thought and takes place in the Midlands at the Heritage Motor Centre which is situated just two minutes from J12 M40 and is easy for you to find.
With the imminent release of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and the .Net framework
4, VBUG4Thought celebrates and highlights these new products.
This conference is ideal if you wish to learn about the new enhancements, features
and capabilities of VS2010 and .Net 4. The conference will also give you an overview
of how you can apply these technologies in new or existing projects.
As usual, we'll be featuring key speakers from the UK and abroad in order to give
you expert, impartial and informative advice.
We are delighted to have the following speakers:
Eric Nelson
-
Building an Application for Windows Azure & SQL Azure
Gill Cleeren -
Silverlight 4 tour de force, with a little WPF 4 sauce on top
Hadi Hariri -
Real-world applications with ASP.NET MVC and jQuery
Dave Sussman -
What you really need to know about .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010
Jon Skeet -
Don't call us, we'll call you: an introduction to the Reactive Extensions to .NET
Josh Twist
-
Building an App Store for the enterprise with MEF and .NET 4.0
For full agenda click here
Hope to meet some of you there!
To finish the 2010 version of TechDays, we at Visug were lucky to be able to do a nerd dinner with Scott Hanselman. Over 50 Visug’ers came to the dinner, making the whole night a true success. Not only Scott came to the dinner, we also had the company of Sara Ford, Charley Kindle, Bart De Smet and other Microsoft employees.
Stijn Volders was kind enough to take some pictures, the complete set can be viewed here.
Overlapping with the Dutch DevDays event this year, I was of course present at TechDays 2010 Belgium as well. TechDays really became a big event with lots of attendees, speakers and sponsors. Never before had the line-up of speakers been so impressive, with names such as Anders Hejlsberg, Scott Hanselman, Charley Kindel… The feedback that I’ve heard was very positive, with the general comment being that the session content was good, deep dive and well brought by the speakers.
I got 2 session slots:
As promised during the talks, I have uploaded all slide decks and demos for both sessions below. You can download them and use them as you like.
I took some pictures during the event as well. Below I posted some, the entire set can be seen here.
On March 29th and 30th 2010, DevDays 2010 Netherlands took place for the 13th time. The event, if I heard and remember correctly, had over 2300 attendees and 120 developer sessions.
I was there, for the second year in a row, as speaker and gave a talk on ASP.NET 4.0. The session slides and demos are available for you to download and use:
Here are some images of the event I took with my phone.
The rest of the pictures can be found here.
I just noticed now that Silverlight 4 officially hit RC, that the book I wrote (together with Kevin Dockx) is now featured on Silverlight.net: http://www.silverlight.net/learn/books/ . Really cool to be on that site!!
The month of March has already started. That means that the biggest conference for the Netherlands is almost upon us: DevDays 2010 (www.devdays.nl).
About the conference (Dutch):
DevDays 2010: het grootste Microsoft evenement in Nederland voor software development en softwarearchitectuur. Duizenden professionals bezoeken jaarlijks DevDays om in twee dagen weer volledig op de hoogte te raken van alle actuele ontwikkelingen op hun vakgebied.
I’ll be doing a talk on ASP.NET 4.0 What’s new (http://www.devdays.nl/Agenda.aspx?pid=66&lang=nl). Hope to see you there!
In the coming weeks and months, I’ll be presenting at several conferences. In April, I’m booked to give a talk on Silverlight 4 and WPF 4 in Birmingham for VBUG’s Spring Conference 2010. You can find the full agenda here: http://www.vbug.co.uk/
The event takes place at Heritage Motor Centre on Thursday April 29th 2010.
About the conference:
With the imminent release of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and the .Net framework
4, 'VBUG4Thought' celebrates and highlights these new products.
This conference is ideal if you wish to learn about the new enhancements, features
and capabilities of VS2010 and .Net 4. The conference will also give you an overview
of how you can apply these technologies in new or exisiting projects.
As usual, we'll be featuring key speakers from the UK and abroad in order to give
you expert, impartial and informative advice. Hadi Hariri, Jon Skeet, Gill
Cleeren, Dave Sussman, Josh Twist and Eric Nelson are confirmed as speakers.
In my busy time (see previous post), some really interesting case studies were released.
As many of you may already know, I’m working on a book titled Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook. Writing my first book (together with fellow Silverlight addict Kevin Dockx) has taken a lot of my time, I haven’t been able to blog as much as I used to. My sincere apologies for that :)
The good news is that the book is almost done, we’re in the last straight line to the publication stage! Even more good news is that the book is already available for pre-order at the publisher’s site: http://www.packtpub.com/microsoft-silverlight-4-data-and-services-cookbook/book .
The contents of the books is the following:
Over 85 practical recipes for creating rich, data-driven business applications in Silverlight
In detail:
Microsoft Silverlight is a programmable web browser plugin that enables features including animation, vector graphics, and audio-video playback – features that characterize Rich Internet Applications. However, Silverlight is a great (and growing) Line-Of-Business platform and is increasingly being used to build data-driven business applications. Silverlight Data Services enable efficient access to your data, allowing you to draw on multiple sources of data and solve particular data problems. There is very little existing material that demonstrates how to build data-driven solutions with the platform. Silverlight 3 made a big step into Line-Of-Business data services and Silverlight 4 builds further upon this. This book will enable .NET developers to get their finger on the pulse of data-driven business applications in Silverlight.
This book is not a general Silverlight 3/4 overview book; it is uniquely aimed at developers who want to build data-driven applications. It focuses on showing .NET developers how to interact with, and handle multiple sources of data in Silverlight business applications, and how to solve particular data problems following a practical hands-on approach, using real-world recipes. It is a practical cookbook that teaches you how to build data-rich business applications with Silverlight that draw on multiple sources of data. Most of the covered features work both in Silverlight 3 and 4. However, we cover some that are specific for Silverlight 4, which will therefore not work with Silverlight 3. Where this is the case, it is clearly indicated.
Packed with reusable, real-world recipes, the book begins by introducing you to general principles when programming Silverlight. It then dives deep into the world of data services, covering all the options available to access data and communicate with services to get the most out of data in your Silverlight business applications, whilst at the same time providing a rich user experience. Chapters cover data binding, data controls, the concepts of talking to services, communicating with WCF, ASMX and REST services, and much more.
By following the practical recipes in this book, which are of varying difficulty levels, you will learn the concepts needed to create data-rich business applications—from the creation of a Silverlight application, to displaying data in the Silverlight application and upgrading your existing applications to use Silverlight. Each recipe covers a data services topic, going from the description of the problem, through a conceptual solution to a solution containing sample code.
I’m really really excited about the upcoming release, I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it! As you can see, the book takes a very practical approach to working with Silverlight in enterprise environments using a recipe-approach. The scenarios for these recipes are things me an you often encounter and this book should give you the solution for them. The book is aimed at Silverlight 4 development, although most recipes will work in Silverlight 3 as well.
I hope in the coming weeks/months to be able to give away a few copies of the book from here.
I just created the Visug Twitter account. You can follow @visug from now on for updates, news etc.
And, best of all, we’ll be giving away a free ticket to TechDays 2010 in the coming days to one of our followers!
With January almost behind us, the season of events and conferences is coming closer.
I’ve been confirmed for quite some event already, more on this later.
Since a few days, the first batch of sessions for TechDays 2010 Belgium has been made available on www.techdays.be. I’ll be doing 2 sessions, more specifically:
2007... Silverlight 1.0 is released. 2010… Silverlight 4 is almost upon us. Did you lose track of all the new features that are in the platform right now? And how does Silverlight 4 compare to WPF 4?
In this session, we will take you on a tour through the most exciting features that Silverlight 4 has to offer, varying from Trusted application to full data binding support, from rich text-editing to webcam support etc. While we’re at it, we’ll look at how WPF 4 can help you achieve the same effects.
After this session, you’ll have a better understanding on the position of Silverlight 4 and WPF 4 and their newest features.
NET RIA Services is a new framework allowing you to get easy access to your data in Silverlight applications. While still in beta, this new framework has already caused quite a stir in the community. In this session, we'll explore the current version and its features. This session contains mostly demo’s on how to build a business application with .NET RIA Services.
I’ll also be at DevDays NL, more on this in a few days.
From Visug, we'll also be doing something very special on Thursday April 1st in Antwerp
after TechDays, so keep your agenda free that night!
Yes, I made it :) Welcome to this last post in my Silverlight Advent Calendar! From December 1st until today, December 24th, I have created each day, a Silverlight article. When I first thought about it, I feared there would be at least one day I would not be able to create my post. Well, this didn’t happen, and this means that after 24 articles, we have finally arrived at Christmas Eve. I really hope you enjoyed these posts and I’ll sure be doing something similar in the future!
On a “real” advent calendar, on December 24th, the final day of the calendar, you get a special surprise: a bigger image, a bigger gift or a larger chunk of chocolate than on other days. Well, I thought this needed to be the case in my advent calendar as well, so I decided to end my series with a special post. It gives a preview of something that can in much more detail be found in my upcoming book AND it brings some more Christmas spirit on this day: a Flickr Christmas image browser. All free as my gift to you!
Below is the interface of the application.
We’re in luck when working with Flickr: it exposes a cross-domain file so we can access their API services from a client Silverlight application, even without running with elevated permissions! Therefore, we do not need to create a service layer that sits in between our application and Flickr’s services.
When clicking on the Get Pictures button, we load thumbnails into a templated StackPanel. When clicking on any of these thumbnails, the large image is loaded. To store the information needed for a thumbnail, I created a class called SmallFlickrImage.
public
class SmallFlickrImage
{
public
string ImageId
{ get; set; }
public
string FarmId
{ get; set; }
public
string ServerId
{ get; set; }
public
string Secret
{ get; set; }
public
string ImageUrl
{
get
{
return
string.Format(
"http://farm{0}.static.flickr.com/{1}/{2}_{3}_m.jpg",
FarmId,
ServerId,
ImageId,
Secret
);
}
}
}
In the click event, we perform a service call to Flickr. To call Flickr’s API, you’ll need an API key which can be obtained for free at http://www.flickr.com/services/api/. Once obtained, you need to embed this key in each request your application will perform with Flickr. Also on this site, you’ll find a complete overview of all available methods. Here, I’m using the flickr.photos.search method, which accepts a search string and returns me an XML response, containing all the information I need to display images in my client side application.
Working with Flickr is a typical example of a REST service. When working with these services from Silverlight, we actually need to do 3 steps:
The URL is constructed as follows (as directed by Flickr):
string searchUrl
=
"http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.photos.search&api_key={0}
&text=christmas tree snow";
To send a request to this URL, we can use either the WebClient, or the HttpWebRequest. WebClient is sufficient (there are cases where this is not the case, I spent many pages to this topic in my book ;) ). Working in Silverlight with WebClient is identical to working with this class in the full .NET framework. One thing though: just like any interaction with a service, the service call is to be done asynchronously. The code below sends a request to Flickr:
private
void GetPicturesButton_Click(object sender,
RoutedEventArgs e)
{
WebClient client = new WebClient();
client.DownloadStringCompleted +=
new DownloadStringCompletedEventHandler(client_DownloadStringCompleted);
client.DownloadStringAsync(new Uri(string.Format(searchUrl, api_key)));
}
In the callback, which is invoked automatically when the service returns, using some very simple LINQ-To-XML, we can parse the results. The returned XML is always of the same format and can be seen as the contract between Flickr and my application. Because we cannot set the Source property of an Image control directly, we need to go around using a BitmapImage.
protected
void client_DownloadStringCompleted(object sender,
DownloadStringCompletedEventArgs e)
{
XDocument xml = XDocument.Parse(e.Result);
var photos = from results in xml.Descendants("photo")
select new SmallFlickrImage
{
ImageId = results.Attribute("id").Value.ToString(),
FarmId = results.Attribute("farm").Value.ToString(),
ServerId = results.Attribute("server").Value.ToString(),
Secret = results.Attribute("secret").Value.ToString()
};
foreach (var
photo in photos)
{
Image image = new Image();
BitmapImage bitmapImage = new BitmapImage(new Uri(photo.ImageUrl, UriKind.Absolute));
image.Source = bitmapImage;
image.Width = 160;
image.Height = 160;
image.Stretch = Stretch.Uniform;
image.Tag = photo;
image.Margin = new Thickness(3);
image.HorizontalAlignment = HorizontalAlignment.Center;
image.MouseLeftButtonDown += new MouseButtonEventHandler(img_MouseLeftButtonDown);
PicListBox.Items.Add(image);
}
}
At this point, the ListBox is filled. This ListBox is templated; the code for this can be seen in the sample code download.
When clicking (we attached a MouseLeftButtonDown event on each dynamically added image) on an image, we’ll load the "full” image into an Image control. This requires some code, mostly concerning which type of URL is used by Flickr for the image.
void img_MouseLeftButtonDown(object sender,
MouseButtonEventArgs e)
{
Image img = sender as Image;
SmallFlickrImage smallFlickrImage = img.Tag as SmallFlickrImage;
if (smallFlickrImage
!= null)
{
WebClient detailClient = new WebClient();
detailClient.DownloadStringCompleted +=
new DownloadStringCompletedEventHandler(detailClient_DownloadStringCompleted);
detailClient.DownloadStringAsync(
new Uri(string.Format(detailUrl,
api_key, smallFlickrImage.ImageId)));
}
}
void detailClient_DownloadStringCompleted(object sender,
DownloadStringCompletedEventArgs e)
{
XDocument xmlDocument = XDocument.Parse(e.Result);
XElement photoElement;
Uri detailImageUrl;
if (xmlDocument.Descendants("photo").Count<XElement>()
> 0)
{
photoElement = xmlDocument.Descendants("photo").First<XElement>();
string serverId
= photoElement.Attribute("server").Value;
string farmId
= photoElement.Attribute("farm").Value;
string imageId
= photoElement.Attribute("id").Value;
string secret;
if (photoElement.Attribute("originalsecret")
!= null)
{
secret = photoElement.Attribute("originalsecret").Value;
detailImageUrl = new Uri(string.Format
("http://farm{0}.static.flickr.com/{1}/{2}_{3}_o.jpg",
farmId,
serverId,
imageId,
secret)
);
}
else
{
secret = photoElement.Attribute("secret").Value;
detailImageUrl = new Uri(string.Format
("http://farm{0}.static.flickr.com/{1}/{2}_{3}.jpg",
farmId,
serverId,
imageId,
secret)
);
}
BitmapImage bitmapImage = new BitmapImage(detailImageUrl);
DetailImage.Source = bitmapImage;
}
}
With that, the sample is working!
The complete code sample can be downloaded here: SLChristmasFlickr.zip (31.34 KB)
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
In the before-last post of my Silverlight Advent Calendar, I would like to spend some time with a Silverlight 3 feature that’s most helpful in real world projects: merged resource dictionaries. By most helpful, I mean that in real applications, resource files can become really really big. Files of 1000 lines of pure mark-up are no exception and are really hard to find your way in.
Silverlight 3 added support for merged dictionaries. Basically, using these, we can split resources over several files, dictionaries. Using them though is nothing different than using resources located in App.xaml or Resources of the current page/control.
Let’s take a look at using these merged resource dictionaries. I created some styles to style the ChristmasSong application we have been using a few times already.
In the beginning of this series, we already looked at implicit styles. For this application, I’m defining a few of these, meaning that this very project will only work for Silverlight 4. Of course, the merged dictionary function works also in Silverlight 3.
To define a resource dictionary, in the project, we need to add a XAML file (either via creating an empty text file and renaming the extension or creating a new user control and deleting the *.cs file). In this file, we can create a ResourceDictionary element. Below is the XAML code for the implicit styles, which I grouped into a file called DefaultStyles.xaml. I created a default style for a Button, TextBlock and TextBox.
<
ResourceDictionary
xmlns
="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x
="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
>
<
Style
TargetType
="Button"
>
<
Setter
Property
="Foreground"
Value
="Black"
/>
<
Setter
Property
="Background"
Value
="Red"
/>
<
Setter
Property
="FontWeight"
Value
="Bold"
/>
<
Setter
Property
="FontSize"
Value
="15"
/>
<
Setter
Property
="HorizontalAlignment"
Value
="Center"
></
Setter
>
<
Setter
Property
="VerticalAlignment"
Value
="Center"
></
Setter
>
</
Style
>
<
Style
TargetType
="TextBlock"
>
<
Setter
Property
="Foreground"
Value
="Green"
/>
<
Setter
Property
="FontWeight"
Value
="Bold"
/>
<
Setter
Property
="FontSize"
Value
="15"
/>
<
Setter
Property
="HorizontalAlignment"
Value
="Left"
></
Setter
>
<
Setter
Property
="VerticalAlignment"
Value
="Center"
></
Setter
>
<
Setter
Property
="Margin"
Value
="2"
></
Setter
>
</
Style
>
<
Style
TargetType
="TextBox"
>
<
Setter
Property
="Width"
Value
="150"
/>
<
Setter
Property
="FontSize"
Value
="15"
/>
<
Setter
Property
="HorizontalAlignment"
Value
="Center"
></
Setter
>
<
Setter
Property
="VerticalAlignment"
Value
="Center"
></
Setter
>
<
Setter
Property
="Margin"
Value
="2"
></
Setter
>
</
Style
>
</
ResourceDictionary
>
Next, I created a second ResourceDictionary which has just one Style, designed for the title, in a file called SpecificStyles.
<
ResourceDictionary
xmlns
="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x
="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
>
<
Style
TargetType
="TextBlock"
x:Key
="TitleStyle"
>
<
Setter
Property
="Foreground"
Value
="Red"
/>
<
Setter
Property
="FontStyle"
Value
="Italic"
></
Setter
>
<
Setter
Property
="FontWeight"
Value
="Bold"
/>
<
Setter
Property
="FontSize"
Value
="28"
/>
<
Setter
Property
="HorizontalAlignment"
Value
="Center"
></
Setter
>
<
Setter
Property
="VerticalAlignment"
Value
="Center"
></
Setter
>
</
Style
>
</
ResourceDictionary
>
Now we need to let our application know about these resources. To do so, I have in the App.xaml added the following code. In the MergedDictionaries element, we link the seperate XAML files.
<
Application
xmlns
="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x
="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
x:Class
="SLMergedDictionaries.App"
>
<
Application.Resources
>
<
ResourceDictionary
>
<
ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries
>
<
ResourceDictionary
Source
="/SLMergedDictionaries;component/DefaultStyles.xaml"
>
</
ResourceDictionary
>
<
ResourceDictionary
Source
="/SLMergedDictionaries;component/SpecificStyles.xaml"
>
</
ResourceDictionary
>
</
ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries
>
</
ResourceDictionary
>
</
Application.Resources
>
</
Application
>
We can now use the styles declared in the dictionaries just like we would do with regular defined styles.
The complete sample can be downloaded here: SLMergedDictionaries.zip (310.39 KB)
Next to the full support of the data binding engine for the IDataErrorInfo interface, Silverlight 4 adds a new interface called INotifyDataErrorInfo, offering more options for particular scenario's. In this post, we’ll look at a small example using this interface.
IDataErrorInfo allows retrieving the error on a per-property basis. It’s not possible however to validate all properties of the entity in one go. This becomes possible with the INotifyDataErrorInfo. Let’s look at the interface first.
public
interface INotifyDataErrorInfo
{
bool HasErrors
{ get; }
event EventHandler
ErrorsChanged;
IEnumerable GetErrors( string propertyName);
}
This interface has some nice advantages. As said, we can check if the entity as a whole is in an invalid state through the HasErrors property. Retrieving the errors using the GetErrors can now retrieve other things than just strings which was all that we could do with the IDataErrorInfo. On top of that, a property can have more than just one validation error at the same time
The ErrorsChanged event can come in handy if there’s a long running process needed to perform validation: assume that for some validation, we need to go to the database over a service. The ErrorsChanged event allows us to notify the UI if the validation errors change. If ValidatesOnNotifyDataErrors is set to true on the UI, Silverlight will listen for the ErrorsChanged event and will display any errors if they are added afterwards.
That’s it for this interface, let’s now look at it in an example. I have changed the example created for the IDataErrorInfo to work with INotifyDataErrorInfo, so the interface has remained the same.
The errors I want to return to my interface are more than just strings. I created a custom error as follows:
public
class ChristmasSongError
{
public ErrorLevel
Severity{ get; set; }
public
string ErrorName
{ get; set; }
public
string ErrorMessage
{ get; set; }
public
override
string ToString()
{
return ErrorName
+ ": " + ErrorMessage;
}
}
The ChristmasSong class now implements the INotifyDataErrorInfo interface. Let’s focus
on the Title property. When its value is set, it calls a validation method. In this
method, I create an instance of the custom error, specifying all the property values.
If there’s an error, here the title being empty, I add it to a Dictionary called errors
using the AddError method. If validation is satisfied, it’s removed using the RemoveError
method. The errrors Dictionary is used so it is possible for each property to have
more than one error: each property has as its value a List
public
class ChristmasSong
: INotifyDataErrorInfo
{
private
string title;
private
string performedBy;
private TimeSpan
duration;
private DateTime
published;
private
string error;
public Dictionary<string,
List
> errors =
new Dictionary<string,List
>();
public
event PropertyChangedEventHandler
PropertyChanged;
protected
void NotifyPropertyChanged(string propertyName)
{
if (PropertyChanged
!= null)
PropertyChanged( this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName));
}
public
string Title
{
get
{
return title;
}
set
{
title = value;
ValidateTitleProperty();
}
}
private
void ValidateTitleProperty()
{
ChristmasSongError christmasSongError =
new ChristmasSongError()
{ Severity = ErrorLevel.Error, ErrorName =
"TitleRequired",
ErrorMessage = "Title
should not be empty" };
if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(title))
{
AddError( "Title",
christmasSongError);
}
else
{
RemoveError( "Title", "TitleRequired");
}
}
public
string PerformedBy
{
get
{
return performedBy;
}
set
{
performedBy = value;
ValidatePerformedByProperty();
}
}
private
void ValidatePerformedByProperty()
{
ChristmasSongError christmasSongError =
new ChristmasSongError()
{ Severity = ErrorLevel.Error, ErrorName =
"PerformedByRequired",
ErrorMessage = "The
artist should not be empty" };
if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(performedBy))
{
AddError( "PerformedBy",
christmasSongError);
}
else
{
RemoveError( "PerformedBy", "PerformedByRequired");
}
}
public TimeSpan
Duration
{
get
{
return duration;
}
set
{
duration = value;
ValidateDuration();
}
}
private
void ValidateDuration()
{
ChristmasSongError durationNullError =
new ChristmasSongError()
{ Severity = ErrorLevel.CriticalError, ErrorName =
"DurationNull",
ErrorMessage = "The
duration should not be empty" };
ChristmasSongError durationTooLongError =
new ChristmasSongError()
{ Severity = ErrorLevel.Error, ErrorName =
"DurationTooLong",
ErrorMessage = "The
duration is too long" };
if (duration
== TimeSpan.Zero)
{
AddError( "Duration",
durationNullError);
}
else
{
RemoveError( "Duration", "DurationNull");
}
if (duration.TotalSeconds
> 500)
{
AddError( "Duration",
durationTooLongError);
}
else
{
RemoveError( "Duration", "DurationTooLong");
}
}
public DateTime
Published
{
get
{
return published;
}
set
{
published = value;
VaidatePublished();
}
}
private
void VaidatePublished()
{
ChristmasSongError publishedTooLow =
new ChristmasSongError()
{ Severity = ErrorLevel.CriticalError, ErrorName =
"PublishedTooLow",
ErrorMessage = "The
date is too small" };
ChristmasSongError publishedTooHigh =
new ChristmasSongError()
{ Severity = ErrorLevel.CriticalError, ErrorName =
"PublishedTooHigh",
ErrorMessage = "The
date is too high" };
if (published
< new DateTime(1900, 1, 1))
{
AddError( "Published",
publishedTooLow);
}
else
{
RemoveError( "Published", "PublishedTooLow");
}
if (published
> new DateTime( 2010, 1, 1))
{
AddError( "Published",
publishedTooHigh);
}
else
{
RemoveError( "Published", "PublishedTooHigh");
}
}
private
void AddError(string propertyName,
ChristmasSongError error)
{
if (!errors.ContainsKey(propertyName))
{
errors.Add(propertyName, new List() { error });
}
else
//
adding the error to the already existing list
{
var list = errors[propertyName];
list.Add(error);
}
if (ErrorsChanged
!= null)
ErrorsChanged( this, new DataErrorsChangedEventArgs(propertyName));
}
private
void RemoveError(string propertyName, string errorName)
{
if (errors.ContainsKey(propertyName))
{
var christmasSongError = errors[propertyName]
.Where(e => e.ErrorName == errorName).FirstOrDefault();
var list = errors[propertyName];
list.Remove(christmasSongError);
if (list.Count
== 0)//no more errors for this property
{
errors.Remove(propertyName);
}
if (ErrorsChanged
!= null)
ErrorsChanged( this, new DataErrorsChangedEventArgs(propertyName));
}
}
public
event EventHandler
ErrorsChanged;
public System.Collections.IEnumerable
GetErrors(string propertyName)
{
if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(propertyName))//retrieve
errors for entire entity
{
return errors.Values;
}
else
{
if (errors.ContainsKey(propertyName))
return errors[propertyName];
return
null;
}
}
public
bool HasErrors
{
get
{
if (errors.Count
== 0)
return
false;
return
true;
}
}
}
With the entity in place, we can look at the UI. The XAML code is similar to the IDataErrorInfo example, although we should now use the ValidatesOnNotifyDataErrors and set it to True. Below is part of the code, for the entire listing, see the download.
<
TextBox x : Name ="TitleTextBox" Grid.Row ="1" Grid.Column ="1" Width ="200" VerticalAlignment ="Center" HorizontalAlignment ="Left" Margin ="2"Text ="{ Binding Path =Title, Mode =TwoWay, ValidatesOnNotifyDataErrors =True, NotifyOnValidationError =True}" />
The complete sample can be downloaded here: SLINotifyDataErrorInfo.zip (602.56 KB)
Services and data access are the focus of the book I’m writing (more very very soon!). Working with services to get data into a Silverlight application is so vital, it should be code that’s known by every Silverlight developer by heart. Working with duplex bindings is somewhat more complicated. However, there are situations in which duplex communication is really necessary. Think of the typical example: a stock application that should send stock updates to the client without the client requesting for an update.
Duplex communications are possible with WCF. They “seem” initiated by the server: the service will send updates without the client requests the service to do so. This way, the client can receive updates whenever new information is available on the server (new stock info that becomes available) and act accordingly. I put seem between quotes. The reason for that is that a duplex binding is in fact still a normal request/receive process. Initially, the client has to do a request to the service and from then on, the service can send its updates to the client.
In the example I have created for this post, I created an application that posts updates about snow throughout Belgium (while writing this article, it has snowed quite a lot in Belgium, so that’s where the inspiration came from and Tienen is where I live :) ). Below is a screenshot.
Of course, you’re here to learn something and see some code, right? No problem! Let’s first focus on the service. For the data exchange, I created a small type called SnowUpdate.
public
class SnowUpdate
{
public
string Location
{ get; set; }
public
double centimeter
{ get; set; }
}
One very important thing that we need to do, is adding a reference to an assembly available in the Silverlight SDK called System.Service.PollingDuplex.dll. By default, it’s installed in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Silverlight\v4.0\Libraries\Server. Add a reference to this assembly. (Note the x86, that’s because I’m running 64bit).
The contract of the service makes it clear that we are working with a duplex service. There are some special things to note in this code. As you can see, two interfaces are defined here. The first one is the regular contract, the second one is what’s called the callback contract and defines the contract for the call to the client.
Also note that both OperationContracts have IsOneWay set to true. For the Connect method, we’re actually saying: a client can call Connect to make itself known to the service but it expects no response, hence the IsOneWay.
[ServiceContract(Namespace = "Silverlight", CallbackContract = typeof(ISnowServiceClient))]
public
interface ISnowService
{
[OperationContract(IsOneWay = true)]
void Connect();
}
[ServiceContract]
public
interface ISnowServiceClient
{
[OperationContract(IsOneWay = true)]
void SendSnowUpdate(SnowUpdate
snowUpdate);
}
In the service implementation, I have created a Timer, which will periodically send a new message to the client. The OperationContext.Current.GetCallbackChannel gives us access to the callback channel which we can use to send messages to the client side. On a tick of the Timer, we’re sending a message.
private ISnowServiceClient
client;
private Timer
timer;
public
void Connect()
{
client = OperationContext.Current.GetCallbackChannel<ISnowServiceClient>();
timer = new Timer(new TimerCallback(TimerTick), null, 500, 5000);
}
void TimerTick(object state)
{
try
{
if (client
!= null)
{
client.SendSnowUpdate(GetLatestUpdate());
}
}
catch (Exception)
{
client = null;
timer.Dispose();
}
}
With that, the service code is done, but it does require some specific configuration code to work. Take a look at the sample for this code. We can now look at the client code. The process to add a service reference is exactly the same, although you’ll notice that the ServiceReferences.clientconfig file remains empty (which it does not when referencing a normal service). Therefore, the code that we need to write is somewhat more complex: we have to create the binding and the address from code and pass this along with the proxy instantiation. Below you can see the client-side code.
private
void UserControl_Loaded(object sender,
RoutedEventArgs e)
{
EndpointAddress address = new EndpointAddress("http://localhost:59485/SnowService.svc");
CustomBinding binding = new CustomBinding(
new PollingDuplexBindingElement(),
new BinaryMessageEncodingBindingElement(),
new HttpTransportBindingElement());
client = new SLDuplexSnow.SnowService.SnowServiceClient(binding,
address);
client.SendSnowUpdateReceived +=
new EventHandler<SLDuplexSnow.SnowService.SendSnowUpdateReceivedEventArgs>
(client_SendSnowUpdateReceived);
client.ConnectAsync();
}
void client_SendSnowUpdateReceived(object sender,
SLDuplexSnow.SnowService.SendSnowUpdateReceivedEventArgs e)
{
SnowDetailsGrid.DataContext = e.snowUpdate;
}
Note that we are calling ConnectAsync to let the service know about the client so it can send updates to it BUT we are handing SnowUpdateReceived events.
NOTE: This sample is written for Silverlight 3/VS2008. At this point, I have issues with VS2010 when generating the client proxy with SL4/VS2010 when using a duplex service.
The complete code can be downloaded here: SLDuplex.zip (111.91 KB)
In today’s post, we’ll take a look at Silverlight’s Isolated Storage, a feature already available in Silverlight since version 2. With this post, I want to show all there is possible with this handy option.
We all know cookies, small text files that are stored on our machines by sites. Most of the time, the goal of a cookie, is storing informational data for next visits of the user to that particular site. This data can vary from login information to perhaps a background color the user favors. Cookies are limited to containing just plain text as well as in size.
Isolated storage does not differ that much from cookies. It’s basically a file store for Silverlight: Silverlight applications can store in the Isolated Storage files during a session and retrieve them in a later session. Isolated storage is a per-user per-application storage, meaning that when userA works with SilverlightAppA, he’ll have a different isolated storage from userB working with the same application. Isolated storage information is not deleted when you clear your temporary internet files, it can be deleted through the Silverlight configuration, as shown below.
We can use isolated storage in a number of ways. Let’s take a look at the sample for this post. Below is a screenshot of the very simple UI I created for this sample. It allows a user to enter a text, representing his preferred background color for the application. We’ll store this value using the IsolatedStorage. Secondly, using another feature called IsolatedStorageSettings, I’m allowing the user to store a second value, which is used for the color of a StackPanel ( the blue bar in the screenshot).
First, let’s look at the code for the background color, using the regular IsolatedStorage. Below you can see the code. Working with IsolatedStorage is done using the IsolatedStorageFile class. It defines among others, the GetUserStoreForApplication static method, which returns the data store, for the specific user and the current application. From there on, working with IsolatedStorage is similar to working with the regular file system. Isolated storage is not to be seen as one file, it’s an entire file system, that can contain directories and files. In this code, we are creating using System.IO code a file called color.txt and writing some data to this file.
private
void ColorButton_Click(object sender,
RoutedEventArgs e)
{
try
{
IsolatedStorageFile isoStore = IsolatedStorageFile.GetUserStoreForApplication();
using (IsolatedStorageFileStream
fs = isoStore.CreateFile("color.txt"))
{
StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(fs);
writer.Write(ColorTextBox.Text);
writer.Close();
}
ChangeColor(ColorTextBox.Text);
}
catch (Exception)
{
//handle
error here, not for demo
}
}
On load of the application, we need to check if this file already exists and if yes, read the file and set the background to that specific color. This is shown in the code below.
private
void UserControl_Loaded(object sender,
RoutedEventArgs e)
{
try
{
IsolatedStorageFile isoStore = IsolatedStorageFile.GetUserStoreForApplication();
if (isoStore.FileExists("color.txt"))
{
using (IsolatedStorageFileStream
fs = isoStore.OpenFile("color.txt", FileMode.Open))
{
StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(fs);
ChangeColor(reader.ReadLine());
reader.Close();
}
}
}
catch (Exception)
{
//handle
error here, not for demo
}
}
In ASP.NET, we have the Application and Session objects, which provide an easy and quick way to store information between requests. Through a feature of the IsolatedStorage, we can have something quite similar. The IsolatedStorageSettings allow us a key/value lookup to store data. We don’t have to write code to actually store the files, it does that for us. Take a look at the following code. We allow the user to store a second string for the background of the StackPanel.
private
void AppColorButton_Click(object sender,
RoutedEventArgs e)
{
IsolatedStorageSettings.ApplicationSettings["AppColor"]
= AppColorTextBox.Text;
ChangeStackPanelColor(AppColorTextBox.Text);
}
Using this approach, we say for the AppColor value, store the contents of the TextBox as value. Behind the scenes, this is persisted, so it can be retrieved after the application has been shutdown (it is thus not stored in application memory). Retrieving the value can be done as follows:
if (IsolatedStorageSettings.ApplicationSettings.Contains("AppColor"))
{
string appColor
= IsolatedStorageSettings.ApplicationSettings["AppColor"].ToString();
ChangeStackPanelColor(appColor);
}
The complete sample can be downloaded here: SLIsolatedStorage.zip (30.84 KB)