Search results matching tags 'Silverlight' and 'Microsoft'

Silverlight 4 Previewed in Amsterdam

NunoGodinho — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Silverlight 3 just got out and already we are hearing about the new version, and this is one of the huge advantages that Silverlight has (IMHO of course), because we know that they are always trying to get more into there without sacrificing the size and the cross-browser and platform of the technology.

One of the first sneaks about the new Silverlight 4 was in Amsterdam as you can read more here, in this The Inquirer article.

“(…)In an early preview of Silverlight 4 media-specific features, the Vole showed off what its next generation of movie experiences could do even when saddled with its offline PlayReady DRM. (…)”

“(…) A spokes Vole said that Silverlight 4 will enable movie studios to offer network-delivered updates, special offers and live events, and flog more than just one or two movies to punters (…)”

I say, hum interesting, I would love to know more about the new features so I’ll keep blogging when that happens.

Prism and .NET RIA Services

NunoGodinho — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 05:00:00 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.

ADO.NET Data Services v1.5 CTP2 usage in Silverlight

NunoGodinho — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 05:00:00 GMT

After all the information’s regarding the ADO.NET Data Services v1.5 CTP2, now the Product Team launched a tutorial in how to use this version with Silverlight from another domain and also out-of-browser. And so I think this is important for everybody that is working in Silverlight.

In order to know more about the subject read this post from the Product Team.

New Features in CTP2 ADO.NET Data Services v1.5 Explained

NunoGodinho — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 05:00:00 GMT

After yesterdays post about the availability of the CTP2 of ADO.NET Data Services v1.5 here are some more details regarding the Projections, Feed Customization and Data Binding.

As told before Projections, the possibility of getting only the columns chosen instead of retrieving all the columns. With this we have now a new set of expressions to provide this ability on the URI, and in order to achieve we have now two new keywords available, that are:

$select, allow us to define which columns we want to be get
- Instead of using only the http://127.0.0.1/NorthwindService.svc/Customers that will return every column of the Entity Customer, we want to define that we only get the CustomerID and the ContactName, and in order to achieve this we use the new $select keyword like this http://127.0.0.1/NorthwindService.svc/Customers?$select=CustomerID,ContactName
- The way to define the several columns is to use commas to separate the column names.
- If we want to use this keyword and define all columns is the following http://127.0.0.1/NorthwindService.svc/Customers?$select=*

$expand, defines that along with the results from the requested entity, we also want to get the results from a specific relationship
- Usage: http://127.0.0.1/NorthwindService.svc/Customers?$expand=Orders/OrderDetails

But in order for this to work we need to add the following 2 properties to the service:

First, make projections available using the URI.

  1: config.DataServiceBehavior.AcceptProjectionRequests = true;

Secondly, make the protocol version to V2

  1: config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = System.Data.Services.Common.DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2;

For more information’s regarding this subject read this post from the Product Team.

Feed Customizations are the possibility to customize the way the feed is created instead of using only the default AtomPub version.

In order to achieve this customization we must use the EntityPropertyMappingAttribute that will define the relationship between the Property and the name that will be used in the feed.

In the following sample we are defining that when building the feed, instead of using the complete type definition

  1: <author>
  2:    <name>Nuno Godinho</name>
  3:    <email>someone@company.com</email>
  4: </author>

we will have the Author element with the value that is on the Name Property of the Author class (considering that Author is a type that contains several properties and one of them is Name):

  1: [EntityPropertyMapping(
  2:        "Author",/*Source property path , the property of the Entity type to be mapped*/
  3:        SyndicationItemProperty.AuthorName,/* Syndication item to which the Source Property is mapped*/
  4:        SyndicationTextContentKind.Plaintext,/* Syndication content kind for the syndication item this property is bound to */
  5:        true/* If  false the property value is only placed at the mapped location & removed from the <content> section of the atom:entry*/
  6:        )]

  1: <author>Nuno Godinho</author>

Introducing Web Friendly Feeds aka Friendly Feeds (Updated for CTP2)

ADO.NET Data Services Friendly Feeds , Mapping CLR Types

ADO.NET Data Services Friendly Feeds , Mapping EDM Types – I

Data Binding is now simplified, because using the DataServiceCollection class we can bind it directly to the Data Service.

For more information’s regarding this subject read this post from the Product Team.

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

Silverlight 3 with MEF support

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

.NET RIA Services

NunoGodinho — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 05:00:00 GMT

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

In order to know more I decided to compile a set of articles that I think are very interesting to understand .NET RIA Services better.

Have a nice reading about .NET RIA Services

Silverlight 3.0 RTW

NunoGodinho — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 05:00:00 GMT

As you might already know Silverlight 3 RTW is out and with it the great power of Silverlight 3 was unleashed.

The main features made available are:

Tools

Expression Blend 3 RC

Ability to Import Photoshop and Illustrator
SketchFlow
State Management

Visual Studio 2010

Still in Beta 1 version but with a strong design tools for Silverlight

Controls

DataForm

Simple control that enabled a flexible way to display data of a single entity definition. Support several methods such as Display, Edit and Update and navigating to data.

DataPager

This control gives Paging support such as Next/Previous and Numeric paging on elements that implement the IPageViewCollection interface.

Navigation Framework

A Framework that will provide an easy way to provide navigation to applications, and that introduces to Silverlight 2 new controls, called Frame and Page. With it we can partition views into separate XAML files and navigate to each view independently. Also integrates with Browser history providing Browser Back and Forward functions.
SEO – Search Engine Optimization
Deep Linking

Possibility to navigate directly to a specific page in the Silverlight solution

New toolkit controls

Media

Support for H.264 and AAC encoding
Raw audio/video pipeline support that will provide audio/video decoding outside the runtime and render in Silverlight

Graphics

Perspective 3D

Support for 3D scenarios and putting object on a plane for various user experience scenarios.

Pixel Effects

Support for Pixel Shader Effects

Animation Easing

Provides a set of possibilities that will interpolate the animations and provide smoother animation transitions and other visual effects

Bitmap API
GPU Acceleration
Text/Image Improvements

Element-to-Element Binding
Local Connection API

Enable scenarios in order to Silverlight solutions to communicate with each other through an asynchronous messaging system. A pub-sub implementation for Silverlight applications.

Binding Validation API
SaveFileDialog
Dynamic Styling and Based On

Support for DynamicResource
Support for Based On Styles

Caret Brush
Merged Resource Dictionaries
Assembly Caching

Possibility of having the Silverlight solutions load core runtime from a runtime cache rather than having it on the xap file.

Network monitoring API

Possibility to check network status changes.

Out-of-Browser and Offline

Possibility to have the applications run on and off the browser and Offline also, having it work like a desktop solution.

Binary XML

Ability to communicate using WCF with Binary XML data format and providing smaller communications,

Web Service Utility

Slsvcutil.exe that works like the regular WCF svcutil tool but specific for Silverlight

.NET RIA Services (Still in CTP version)

A complete framework that will provide an easy way to develop using the n-tier pattern using the power of ASP.NET to help Silverlight to achieve this.

Know more on the Get Started session of Silverlight.net site.

Interesting articles regarding .NET RIA Services

NunoGodinho — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 05:00:00 GMT

.NET RIA Services are here to make our life easier and they were introduced as part of the Silverlight 3.0 but are not only for Silverlight.

Some interesting reading about it is this:

Getting started with the .NET RIA Services by Maurice de Beijer that talks about the what and the why of .NET RIA Services, as well as the problems that were addressed when designing this RIA Services.
Unit Testing Business Logic in .NET RIA Services by Vijay that talks about how to perform Unit testing on top of the .NET RIA Services elements
.NET RIA Services Samples that provides some samples and Walkthroughs about this new technology that started in Silverlight 3.0 but has a lot more to give.