My first experience with “Web Design” was around 1997. the DotCom thing was heating up and a client wanted to host a web site that was “Designed” by a “Internet Design Company” (that I swear was not in business even 10 days before).

The problem was that the “page was taking too long to load”. I looked at what they did, and saw that while it was a beautiful page (yes, the “site” was only one page!), it was one big .gif file (and this is in the age of 2800 baud modems).

What I did, was break up the parts of the image, into separate images laid out using tables (again this is before the .css gurus told us how evil that was). The “Site” loaded in a tenth of the time and I learned that “Designers are only good for making mock-ups, and only programmers know how to properly make web applications”.

I hate to admit that this has been my attitude until this year. The year I ran into Alan Beasley. Without intending...

I wanted to put a button that would set the current comment to “****” when the button was clicked. I am using View Model (MVVM) and normally you would need to resort to using code behind.

Actually it is simple to do.

 

Live Sample: http://silverlight.adefwebserver.com/RIATasks2ABValidation/RIATasksWeb/

There are many types of Silverlight Validation. This covers the most basic type, validating that the data entered matches the underlying type. In this example we will validate a Date Field.

I decided to make a ADO.NET Entity Framework (EF) / Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) version of my tutorial: “RIATasks: A Simple Silverlight CRUD Example (using View Model and Rx Extensions)”. After doing so, I see that EF does not make much of a difference either way, but, while they have made great strides in easing deployment of WCF 4.0, major issues still remain.

ADO.NET Entity Framework EF could have been used without too much problem. It only took three minutes to convert the application from using Linq to SQL to EF. After using the wizard to create a .edmx file, I only had to make trivial changes to the Linq syntax. For example I changed this:

public string UpdateTask(Task objTask) { string strError = ""; RIATasksDBDataContext DB = new RIATasksDBDataContext(); try { var result = (from Tasks in DB.Tasks where...

Silverlight is different because it communicates with the website that launches it using asynchronous communication. Learning how to design applications this way can be a bit challenging.

This is my MEF rant. Let me say up front that I do not think that Microsoft is doing anything incorrectly. But I have had a chance to spend at least 10 hours working with MEF so I now feel that I am educated enough about it to post a good old fashion rant.

What Is MEF? The documentation for The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) describes its purpose as a tool that "...simplifies the creation of extensible applications". That is a very general statement. It's like describing nuclear physics as "the field of physics that studies the building blocks and interactions of atomic nuclei". In some ways MEF is as powerful to programming as nuclear physics...

Expression Blend DataStore - A Powerful Tool For Designers

Live example:

• Link: Expression Blend Number Guesser

Microsoft Expression Blend 4+ provides a tool called DataStore. It is a very powerful tool for Designers to create functionality in Expression Blend without writing any code. To demonstrate some of it's abilities, I created a number guessing program with no code.

Live Example: http://silverlight.adefwebserver.com/ODataAuthenticationSample/

So you want to use OData but you need to secure the data? There are a ton of ways to do this, but this covers a simple way using ASP.NET Forms Authentication.

This is part II to the previous Blog (http://openlightgroup.net/Blog/tabid/58/EntryId/98/OData-Simplified.aspx) where we looked a simple OData example. This time we will make a simple Silverlight application that talks to an oData service.

Note, for this tutorial, you will also need to download and install RX Extensions from: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/ee794896.aspx, and the Silverlight Toolkit from: http://silverlight.codeplex.com.

As with the last tutorial, we will not use a database, just a simple collection that we are creating programmatically. This will allow you to see just the oData parts.

First, open up the project, in Visual Studio 2010 (or higher), from the zip file at the bottom of this link.



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