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.

Post from: Radu Poenaru's Weblog

SpringBoard 2010 – RIA Business Applications

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.

Post from: Radu Poenaru's Weblog

URL Rewrite = mod_rewrite

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.

She started by stating the design principles and explain them. Once the conceptual base was established, she pointed out by showing some examples of themes and designs that can be created with the newest XAML editor, Blend and how easy is to switch between them. A question that she failed to answer both in the presentation and on the official Mix page of the presentation was a suggestion on about how to switch on runtime (or based on some user preferences / profile) between the available themes.

Another key points in her presentation were:

• design patterns supported by controls: data grid, expanding panels, data navigator, graphs;
• auto generation of a sample dataset based on user selected fields, helping designers to be more efficient and not wait for real databases;
• errors are prevented by constraining user to input only correct data, being signaled when he inputted wrong data;
• the controls affords users to input correct data by suggesting some possible answers from an autocompleted customizable list and guiding him in case of complex and cultural dependant inputs, like date picker;
• graphs that are easy to implement and give a quick view on the data.

Post from: Radu Poenaru's Weblog

Usability

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.

What can a man do in the 75 minutes allotted?

In the case of Scott Hanselman .. a LOT !

Some key points of his presentation, hosted also on his website:

1. XHTML Strict – Showing an easy way to to validate a site as XHTML Strict by using ASP.NET MVC. He pointed out that “You’ve got complete control over every bit that goes out on the wire. I’m still not 100% convinced that XHTML Strict is as crucially important as the <ul-mafia/> says it is, but it’s a simple thing to do it you keep the markup clean, simple and semantic.”
2. Mobile and ASP.NET MVC -   Easy  to make a site done in ASP.NET MVC, but not started with a mobile target in mind, to be available also on mobile devices.
3. Rules. They drive our life why they don’t drive our programming also? Scott has a good point in proposing a fallback strategy who can work neatly for almost any mobile device capable of internet technology.
4. Windows Mobile and iPhone – Interesting point – move all the features also to competitors – Microsoft has passed the bridge to propose also to the programmers an iPhone alternative, although the Apple keeps iPhone application development captive to Apple world.

Final word: If you found this interesting, more conferences can be found on Mix 09 Sessions Site.

Post from: Radu Poenaru's Weblog

MIX09 Scott Hanselman’s FILE|New Project …

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:

First are presented three ways that helps websites by caching:

• Reference Data (Social Network) : local cache in webtier who keeps the link between Usernames and their corresponding database IDs and distributed cache keeping friends list usernames;
• Activity-Oriented Data (Enterprise LOB Application): the caches are now kept in Application Tier instead directly in Web tier, and integrated hubs keep their catalogs cached for easy retrieval;
• Resource-Oriented Data (Flight inventory and pricing booking service): the cache gets now his own compact layer whom keeps track on flight itineraries, segments of travel for interconnection in case of no direct flight, flight prices and seat inventory since most of customers want to choose also a specific seat (I personally love to fly on a seat with window, between cockpit and the wing plane because of visibility of terrain).

  So there are lots of types of cache implementations  – the question which arise is how this new service can improve the caching already existing ?

First thing that we notice is that it is a repository for cache. It is an explicit environment where almost any type of objects can be stored. Secondly, it can be distributed over several machines and still acts unitary.

More interesting points are underlined by Mr. Murali Krishnaprasad:

• it uses any device who has an Windows operating system, .Net framework installed, memory and network interface – not only expensive servers, but also normal development machines ( by example during the weekend when no one is in office );
• it increases performance by caching objects close to application;
• you can add more machines dynamically (by using one line of command prompt) as the load increases – the prerequisite is to have the Velocity service installed;
• the service has a backup mechanism which ensures that no data is lost when a machine who has a portion of cache exits ungracefully by keeping on all machines backups of cache from the other machines.
• it is an embedded service in ASP .Net application, so it can be used without much hassle, by using some directives in config file and CreateRepository and GET / PUT

One bad point that I noticed (in the final of the presentation – Questions part) is that all caching data is kept in memory, not being saved actively on hard drive.

The caching mechanism implements a expiry mechanism who ensures that the cached data is dropping old and unused data, but also refreshes it from time to time.

NOTE: All images presented here belong to Microsoft Corporation.

The show is presented in several formats for download and offline viewing:   iPod (MP4)  WMV  WMV (High)   Zune

Post from: Radu Poenaru's Weblog

PDC 2008 – Project "Velocity": A First Look

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

• New modes to address entities and entity sets in Atom and JSON formats, using html querystrings whom can also do (!!! YUMMI !!!) sorting, filtering, paging.This presents the new idea for future – “Move from knowing the service to knowing the entity”.

• Uniform interface – no URIs used any more – the system will handle them transparently, in settings files.

• Remoting the query to data service and pushing data to cloud store.

• Reusing URIs – now you can cache them !!!

NOTE: All images presented here belong to Microsoft Corporation.

The show is presented in several formats for download and offline viewing: iPod (MP4)  WMV  WMV (High)  Zune

Post from: Radu Poenaru's Weblog

PDC 2008 – Developing Applications Using Data Services

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!

Post from: Radu Poenaru's Weblog

PDC 2008 – Apps for babies in .Net 4.0