Conferences
SpringBoard 2010 – RIA Business Applications
Apr 7th
Today I had the pleasure to present the “RIA Business Applications”. This was a conference of Microsoft Student Partners, of which I am a proud member. My talk covered the Visual Studio 2010 RIA business template, Silverlight 4 in general, RIA WCF and more than this, the Business perspective on software development.
Silverlight, Entities and RIA WCF service combined brings in business world a new approach, outclassing previous implementations of processes by taking what is good in both worlds, of web and desktop applications. It combines the power of a client side application with the web availability, offering a quick way to improve the experience of the business users.
First, we had a quick walkthrough through different options that a user can have when building a Silverlight application, for business or not:
- the Silverlight template, who offers only the basics required to create a Silverlight application
- Navigation template, who adds navigation and deep linking in the picture
- Business template, who, besides navigation, inserts also a RIA WCF service into the solution and links it to the corresponding Silverlight project.
Then we jumped into the code, the rest of the presentation focusing on features required by professionals :
- different templates for editing and viewing,
- Domain Data Source who encapsulates and exposes strong types,
- the CollectionViewSource object and its use,
- Drag&Drop databinding, Charting,
- cross field validation including the new INotifyDataError,
- Camera usage in a real application,
- Printing features in Silverlight 4 with custom templates,
- Clipboard interaction – copy / paste into Excel,
- Theming of application – usage and switching,
- Contextual menus at right click and their scopes and availability,
- the new Commanding feature from Silverlight 4
I had a lot to present, jumping from code to PowerPoint presentation, in a very fast pace.
URL Rewrite = mod_rewrite
Mar 29th
SEO tools and mod_rewrite were out for a while. They do amazing things, like enabling humans to have a crisp view about the contents of a link. Unfortunately, until IIS 7 Microsoft didn’t had nothing comparable as default, but some companies struggled to offer this basic service.The two options were the rather cheap IISRewrite and the free ISAPI Rewrite Filter.
Mr Thomas Deml, Lead Program Manager in the IIS team, responsible for Security, Performance, Shared Hosting, presents in his overview about how SEO can be added to your application in his breakout session in MIX 09
Come learn SEO best practices and proven techniques that can boost the position of a Web site in search results pages.
Instead of having www.blabla.com/index.aspx?q=cats you can create a redirect to same page, but have instead the link www.blabla.com/search/cats. This enables the search engines to operate more efficiently in serving their customers (which can be also your customers, by the way) more accurate responses to their needs.
Usability
Mar 23rd
Is Microsoft learning basic principles of Usability?
Corrina Black, lead designer for the Silverlight platform, presents usability principles implementation in the newest Silverlight 3. She is focused very much on design, so no coding best practices will be heard here. Only good advices on how to create an appealing, easy to understand interface.
MIX09 Scott Hanselman’s FILE|New Project …
Mar 22nd
Scott Hanselman had a presentation at Mix 09 conference – File | New Company: Creating NerdDinner.com with Microsoft ASP.NET MVC. This was in its unique style – fun, rich in content, tricks, advices but most of all was fun.
This year he managed to create a new type of presentation – without the actual presentation! No more constrained to some slides, just him, Visual Studio and the audience. Yes, the audience – who seemed to absorb any words spoken there, helping Scott with few advices in some key points.
PDC 2008 – Project "Velocity": A First Look
Dec 3rd
This presentation was held by Murali Krishnaprasad, who is a prestigious Microsoft professional. He is Principal Architect of Velocity – the distributed caching platform”. His presentation revolved around new methods and services for better caching web application, but also on scaling this methods for a computer farm or a cluster.
Let’s take a look on the system architecture:
PDC 2008 – Developing Applications Using Data Services
Dec 1st
This presentation, is done by Mike Flasko, Program Manager at Microsoft Corporation. Smart, well prepared and having good oratorical skills, he is one of the best presenters that I have listen to. He has several other blogs, interesting to see is also this one. He leads the Astoria team which has an interesting blog here.
For all of us who didn’t had the pleasure to go to the actual event, the link is on Channel 9 PDC area. Maybe next year we’ll shake hands with Mr. Mike Flasko.
Here are some of the things presented (this listing is just a teaser, you should discover the rest) :
- New models for communication
PDC 2008 – Apps for babies in .Net 4.0
Nov 15th
My personal Software engineer model, Mr. Scott Hanselman, had a very nice presentation at PDC 2008.
He explained the usage of Microsoft’s .Net 4.0 framework in real life examples, creating an interesting environment for very young people (less than 4 years) using Silverlight, PDAs, the new Surface device, webservices, real time interrogation to data bases by auto updating reports and others.
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL49/
Join Scott Hanselman for this lots-of-code-minimal slides talk that walks through the sheer joy of building out a .NET Framework application with Visual Studio using many of the new advances in the .NET Framework 3.5SP1 and 4.0. We have a data layer with Entity Framework, use REST web services with WCF and ADO.NET Data Services, write an ASP.NET site for reporting using Dynamic Data and MVC. All the data will come from a WPF client application and a Silverlight application that the audience will run live! All this, plus it’s an application that babies and toddlers will love!
Enjoy!
