Nuno Filipe Godinho : Patterns

Prism and .NET RIA Services

NunoGodinho — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 18:45:54 GMT

Prism is a real interesting Guidance and was built for Silverlight 2.0, and some of the feedback I’ve received is if it works well with the new version 3.0, and so I remembered blogging about this.

The most usual questions are:

1. Does this work well with Silverlight 3 ?

Yes it works fine with this new version of Silverlight.

2. Does this work well with .NET RIA Services ?

Yes. They don’t only work well together, they actually complement each other, since one of the elements in the product backlog of the Prism Team was the access to server data, and since they didn’t had time to do this, .NET RIA Services can do this for them.

In order to know more about the subject read this David Hill’s post.

About how to have quick starts about Prism read this other David Hill’s post.

Silverlight 3 with MEF support

NunoGodinho — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 18:07:23 GMT

One of the things that I really thing would be important for Silverlight in order to make easier the Modularity of the Business applications developed in Silverlight, since the Prism approach is nice but I think that the MEF approach is simpler and so this should be a breakthrough for Silverlight Business Application Development.

After some talks with Brad Adams from Microsoft and also posting some feedback I came to this very interesting post of Brad that talks about how can we use the MEF for Silverlight that was made available on the CodePlex site related to MEF.

Brad make a very good example of the usage of MEF in this blog post.

So enjoy the reading and good coding.

Silverlight 3 related information’s

NunoGodinho — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 15:20:38 GMT

Silverlight 3 has been release and now we have also the Unit Testing Framework binaries here that will help making Unit Tests in our solutions when using Silverlight 3. More information’s here.

Also important is the release of Prism Visual Studio Templates that will help developers get using the Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight, and make what seems to be hard, simpler, and also with the new MVVM pattern available.

Download the Prism Visual Studio Templates here.

Update to the Prism Visual Studio Templates here.

More information about the Prism Visual Studio Templates here.

Interesting reading about Entity Framework 4.0

NunoGodinho — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 21:36:53 GMT

Entity Framework has suffered great changes and in order to know more about them I recommend the following reading:

POCO (Plain Old CLR Object or Persistence ) in the Entity Framework 4.0

Sneak Preview: Persistence Ignorance and POCO in Entity Framework 4.0
POCO in the Entity Framework:

“Why is POCO important in Entity Framework? Is important because now we have the ability to really separate the Storage Model from the Conceptual Model, and being the Conceptual Model our normal CLR Objects, that was not possible in previous versions of Entity Framework. This is a huge breakthrough for this 4.0 version. Is not perfect, and in this technologies it never is but it’s very interesting”

Part 1 - The Experience (Explains how to make this two parts of the POCO experience with Entity Framework 4.0, from making the Model to the designing of the POCO entities, as well as answering some interesting questions)
Part 2 – Complex Types, Deferred Loading and Explicit Loading (Goes further in the POCO entities and make changes shows how to implement Complex Types as well as configuring the Loading by using Deferred/Lazy Loading or Explicit Loading)
Part 3 – Change Tracking with POCO (Explains furthermore how the Change Tracking, that is so important in Entity Framework, works in POCO entities and how can it be configured by using Metadata)

Using Repository and Unit of Work patterns with Entity Framework 4.0 (Explains how to implement common patterns like Repository and Unit of Work using Entity Framework 4.0)
Entity Framework Feature CTP 1 (Announcement of the Entity Framework CTP Features for .NET 4.0 Beta 1)

Feature CTP Walkthrough: Self Tracking Entities for Entity Framework (Explains the scenarios on where to use the Self Tracking Entities)
Feature CTP Walkthrough: POCO Templates for Entity Framework (Explains how to use POCO Templates, that is a kind of T4 Template in order to generate POCO entities)
Feature CTP Walkthrough: Code Only for Entity Framework (Explains how to Entity Framework without any model like EDMX, just code)

I hope you enjoy the reading.

First Code Parts of Prism 2.0

NunoGodinho — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 18:07:53 GMT

As I previously posted, Prism 2.0 is shaping up and some of the new Code Parts are already available on CodePlex. Of course this is only a small part but it brings good news like:

Multi-targeting quick starts, that explains the structure that a Prism 2.0 project will have in order to be Multi-target for WPF and Silverlight, and in this case is a real state solution.
Multi-targeting Visual Studio Templates, in order to be possible to create the Prism 2.0 projects.
Project Linker Tool, that provides a guidance on how to structure an application in a way that is possible to link it to other applications in order to make it Multi-targeted.

Read more about it in the Readme file that defines this first drop, and also David Hill’s blog post about this subject.

Composite Application Guidance for WPF (Prism) now goes to Silverlight 2.0

NunoGodinho — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 00:34:02 GMT

As I said in a previous post Composite Application Guidance for WPF formerly known as "Prism" was made available and this was a great news because now the development of WPF solutions is easier and as a Guidance that will lead us all the way, helping us make the right choices whenever problems emerge. This is great but being Silverlight a subset of WPF, so wouldn't be great to have the same kind of guidance for Silverlight 2.0?

This is precisely what the team thought and then they started working on it and now we have some "spike's" (A ’spike’ is a small and quickly developed sample application in order to mitigate some risks) being released that will do exactly this, as is announced by Ezequiel Jadib on his blog. It's worth to check and I think it will be very interesting in the near future.

Composite Application Guidance for WPF

NunoGodinho — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 22:25:17 GMT

WPF is a very interesting technology since it provides the possibility to have a better User Experience on our Windows Applications, and by doing so it attracted many designers, enthusiasts as well as Developers, Architects and IT Managers, but what happens with new technologies is that sometimes they are misused by developers and became a problem. And so in order to help developers and architects attend to this type of problems the Patterns and Practices Team has been working on a project named "Composite Application Guidance for WPF", that will make the necessary "mind" adjustments and bring flexibility to the development of new applications in WPF.

This comes on a road that has been very useful on several other technologies like, Web Client Software Factory for ASP.NET, Composite UI Application Block and Smart Client Software Factory for Smart Clients, and even the Enterprise Library, and by doing this the developer has a kind of guideline making the process of developing solutions a little easier.

So check this out here .