ASP Experts

To continue our series , let’s see where the fun comes in my look at how easy that is to consume from the client.  First just to help you understand what is happening behind the covers, let’s look at a code-behind solution.  In View\Home.xaml put a simple DataGrid on the form. < sdk : DataGrid Name = "dataGrid1" Height = "152" Width = "692" /> Then add these lines of code to Home.xaml.cs   1: var context = new DishViewDomainContext(); 2: this .dataGrid1.ItemsSource = context.Restaurants; 3: 4: context.Load(context.GetRestaurantsQuery()); 5:   In line 1, we create a DishViewDomainContext… notice this is the automatically generated (via an MSBuild task) from the DishViewDomainService on the…(read more)

To continue our series I wanted to look next at how to expose your data from the server side of your application.  The interesting data in your business applications come from a wide variety of data sources.  From a SQL Database, from Oracle DB, from Sql Azure, from Sharepoint, from a mainframe and you have likely already chosen a datamodel such as NHibernate, Linq2Sql, Entity Framework, Stored Proc, a service.   The goal of RIA Service in this release is to make it easy to work with data from any (or many) of the sources in a seamless way from a Silverlight application.  This walk through will use Entity Framework accessing the Sql Express database, but the basic concept applies to any data source.  Add DishView…(read more)

To kick off our series, I wanted to focus on our goal of helping you focus on your business, not plumbing code.  The first place you will see this in the pre-build components in the Business Application Template.  It describes a prescriptive application structure, looks great and is easily customizable.     After you have successfully installed Silverlight 4 for developers (which includes RIA Services) you will have a couple of new projects in the Silverlight section.  We are going to focus on the Business Application Template. Notice this creates a single solution with two projects.  BusinessApplication1 is the client part of the application and BusinessApplication2 is the server part.  These are related…(read more)

With Silverlight 4 and RIA Services all-but done, I thought it would be worthwhile to highlight some of the key features of the platform and tools that make Silverlight a fantastic platform for building business applications.    I’ll avoid gratuitous video and dancing hippos and focus on just the bread and butter of business applications:  Querying, Updating, Validating and securing your important business-data.  I’ll also use this to refresh a few of the posts from my Silverlight 3 era series .    The walk through requires: Visual Studio 2010 (or the free express version ) Silverlight 4 Tools (includes RIA Services ) You can download the completed application .   I authored this with Silverlight…(read more)

At Mix10 this morning in Vegas ScottGu announced that Silverlight 4 and RIA Services RC are available for download now!  These bits work great with VS2010 RC .  We have some great videos, and updated samples already posted on http://silverlight.net/riaservices Deepesh has a great list of what is new in this drop  RIA Services RC and Toolkit March 2010 now available… and there is the official forum post from DineshKu RIA Services Road to RTW via RC at MIX . INDEI Support:- Validation support based on Silverlight 4’s INotifyDataErrorInfo. This is a non-exception-based model and enables async validations more easily. It also helps display errors flagged by the server in the UI. Spiffier DDS : filter/sort/group descriptors support…(read more)