Search results matching tags 'Silverlight' and 'Architecture'

MVVM Pattern and Silverlight

Burrows — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 05:00:00 GMT

I have been trying to understand the Model-View-ViewModel pattern for a while and to be honest, getting a good grip on the idea was eluding me. I read many articles; some were too general to be helpful, some were written specifically for WPF (which does not map well to Silverlight because of Silverlight’s lack of commands and triggers), or were shown in applications that were just too complex to really see what was happening.

Then I read Shawn Wildermuth’s article in MSDN Magazine. Shawn showed a fairly simple MVVM example using Silverlight and C#. Thanks to the efforts of Lisa Feigenbaum, Shawn’s code was provided not only in C#, but also in VB.NET in the MSDN Code Gallery.

I decided that I would create my own simple Silverlight client using the MVVM ideas presented by Shawn. I just posted a new tutorial that shows how this application is designed. In this tutorial, I look at a very simple ViewModel that deals with displaying all products from the AdventureWorks database. It shows two versions of the data contract, one using .NET RIA Services and a second using ADO.NET Data Services. In this example, the view is defined as a Silverlight client.

Update .NET RIA Services

NunoGodinho — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Recently I posted about .NET RIA Services that is a framework that is associated with Silverlight and will make the development of business applications easier.

So here a some more links in order to understand .NET RIA Services better.

Have a nice reading about .NET RIA Services

Microsoft Releases Roadmap

NunoGodinho — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 05:00:00 GMT

A lot is being announced this days regarding Microsoft Products and Technologies, and so this is a little summary of all those information's.

First Code Parts of Prism 2.0

NunoGodinho — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 05:00:00 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.

Silverlight Applications Offline

NunoGodinho — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 05:00:00 GMT

This has always been an issue when we talk about Silverlight and so much as been said about it, and so let’s look at the options.

First of all we need to think that Silverlight was not built to be a technology to deliver Occasionally Online applications, it was built to deliver RIA, and so it was made to use Online and not Offline. Is this a problem?

Secondly, Silverlight is a subset of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and so my question is: Do we really need the Occasionally Online approach in Silverlight or do we need to be able to run everything we do in Silverlight in WPF also?

And so my thoughts about my own questions are:

There’s no problem with Silverlight not having been thought in terms of needing the Occasionally Online approach because this is the purpose of WPF, but it must be enhanced with something like the Occasionally Offline approach, because sometimes our Internet connections go down, for several different reasons, and we don’t want to lose all our work done in the Silverlight apps. And if we think that Silverlight 2.0 was built to bring the ability not only for the islands of richness, that was brought by the version 1.0, but also to provide a platform to build Line-Of-Business Applications this will take a lot more importance.

Still about Silverlight having the need to support the Occasionally Online approach I would say that this isn’t really a must have because this is really an Architectural choice to be made during the product planing, and so if we need a Occasionally Online approach we use WPF, and if we need an Online approach we’ll use Silverlight.

OK this is nice but there’s one important aspect that we are forgetting and that is that a product will evolve and suddenly it can turn to need an Occasionally Online approach and so, what will we do? Will we need to build the application again? Of course not, this is where the interaction between WPF and Silverlight needs to appear, because it’s needed that all the features and even controls that work in Silverlight work well in WPF, because this is how real subset frameworks work, and is this now true in Silvelight and WPF? The answer is not everything works, but it’s being worked on.

So a lot still needs to be done in this two awesome technologies that bring great User Experience for applications, but we need to think also that they are relatively new because WPF with the release of .NET 3.5 SP1 just had it’s Third Major Release, and Silvelight is only going for it’s Second. This being said a lot should be expected in both this areas.

In terms of what choices do we have today for making Silvelight a Desktop application / Occasionally Online Applications, they are the following:

Pack it with a lightweight Web Server like Cassini Web Server
Pack it with a custom build Windows Service that will serve the Http Requests needed by the Silverlight App. This seams to me a lot harder because to much as to be done.
Transform it to a WPF like Application. Use this Desklighter tool that will convert your Silverlight App into a Desktop App.

This is a very interesting topic and I would like to ear your thoughts about this subject, so feel free to comment.

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

NunoGodinho — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 05:00:00 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.