Silverlight 5 for Line of Business Applications

Silverlight has quietly gained a major foothold in enterprise environments as the platform of choice for line-of-business applications. Enjoy this article from Jeremy Likness, Microsoft Silverlight MVP of the year, as he walks you through several enhancements in version 5, including text, performance, data-binding, and networking. These features are so powerful that most former barriers to entry for Silverlight in the enterprise will be removed, positioning the platform to host a multitude of powerful applications in the coming years.

Sterling for Isolated Storage on Windows Phone 7

In this article, Windows Phone 7 developers will learn how to leverage the Sterling library to persist and query data locally on the phone with minimal effort, along with a simple strategy for managing state when an application is deactivated during tombstoning.

Advanced Powershell Debugging

In this article, Robbins will show how you can take debugging to the next level in the Integrated Script Environment (ISE) so you will have more confidence to tackle bigger scripts and automation scenarios with PowerShell. PowerShell is the scripting and automation tool of choice for administrators all over the world and is taking developers by storm as well. This article will provide you with insights on how to figure out what is going on and how to produce better PowerShell code.

Empowering Silverlight Designers

In this article, Prosise expresses the importance of developers and designers working together to build a great Silverlight applications. Navigating between design and development is easy because projects created in Visual studio can be accessed in Expression Blend and vice versa. However, developers and designers possess different skill sets that can limit them in the development process. This is where Blend 3 comes in. In this article, Prosise goes in-depth on the behaviors of Blend 3 that can assist designers with a developer’s handiwork. You will also learn triggers, actions and behaviors that make designers more productive.

Getting Started with Windows Azure Access Control Service

This article explains Windows Azure Access Control Service (ACS), which provides developers with a convenient migration path for decoupling security authentication and authorization from their applicants. This allows applications to protect themselves from unauthorized or inappropriate use. By reading this article, you will learn the basics of setting up and configuring ASP to support an application.

Getting Started with Windows Azure Data Storage

Read about and learn the three new types of data storage from the Windows Azure Data Services as well as the importance of each storage type. In addition, learn all you need to know about blobs, tables, storage accounts, queues and more.

HLSL for .NET Programmers

In this article, Walt Ritscher provides an insight to writing some basic HLSL code. He provides background information on shaders, varieties of shaders, how to use Shazzam to edit HLSL, how to write your first HLSL and more. In order to further guide the new HLSL writer, each code is followed by an image of the ending result so writers can check their progress and edit where need be.

Implementing Asynchronous Methods

The .NET Framework’s Asynchronous Programming Model (APM) allows you to initiate I/O operations without blocking any threads. This article provides an easy way to encapsulate some additional state or data with an asynchronous I/O operation and allows us to create new asynchronous abstractions leveraging the existing asynchronous operations already built into the .NET Framework’s Class Library. This article also provides code to get you started implementing asynchronous methods.

Thread Synchronization without Blocking Threads

By using thread synchronization locks, it stops threads from running which creates other threads that increase resource usage and hurts performance. Developers need to understand that threads are an expensive resource to be created for one task and one task alone. A better mindset would be to have a single thread that performs a task now and performs a separate task later, which in turn could improve performance when running on multi-process computers. This article will provide information on how to synchronize threads without having to block other ones by use of Richter’s WriterGate class.

The !heapstat Command in .NET 4.0’s Extension

In this article, John Robbins covers the new !heapstat commands in SOS for .NET 4.0 in order to further one’s understanding in general debugging. Robbins promises to show a running commentary mixing demo code, the SOS commands, and his narrative, to provide value to everyone, despite their lacking extensive education in SOS and WinDBG. By reading this article, you will come away knowing how to determine if dumps are useful for looking at references, which in turn will save you tons of time. You will also learn how to see all of your references quickly and analyze problems without resorting to third party programs.

What’s New in Silverlight 4

In this article, Jeff Prosise explains the new features available in Silverlight 4, which contains something for every developer, whether building line-of-business or smaller apps, and is intended to help developers create richer web applications than ever before. This article also features code snippets and downloadable code samples to educate developers and promises to teach all things Silverlight 4.

XML Data in WPF Applications

XML data is commonly found in text files and RSS streams and used in WPF projects very easily. In this article, Walt Ritscher shares some basic tips for XML binding, which is similar to binding to other data types. As an example he uses an RSS feed from Flickr.com and provides codes and their resulting images to break-down the process of XML binding more simply. Read this article to walk away with an understanding for what is possible with XML binding.

Working with Azure Tables with Multiple Entity Schemas

Azure table storage offers a highly scalable, high performance repository for data. One of the reasons why table performance is good is due to the fact that table storage does not support transactions across tables. But this can be very problematic for a wide range of business applications. For example, if you have a Customer table and an Order table you can add a new order to the order table and add a new customer to the customer table but you can’t do these two operations as a single atomic unit. At first, this may seems like a complete show-stopper as business applications tend to require transactional access of related data. However, before this fact misleads you into avoiding table storage, you should be aware that tables do support the ability to put different kinds of entities (each with its own schema) into a single table and table storage does support entity group transactions, which is the ability to update a group of entities within the same PartitionKey of a table atomically. In this article, I demonstrate a design pattern that makes it easy to program against tables with multiple entity schemas.

How to Write Scalable Silverlight Applications

There are many ways to scale a Silverlight application and these tips from Jeremy Likness should provide a decent foundation to start from. By breaking the application into logical modules, distributing logic between the client and server and sharing business logic across nodes you should be able to scale your application to support from hundreds to millions of concurrent users. Silverlight is the ideal technology to provide line of business software in the enterprise.

Introduction to Profile Silverlight 4 Applications with Visual Studio 2010

Rich client applications focused on line of business and written on the Silverlight platform have become increasingly popular since the introduction of Silverlight 4 in March of 2010. Great performance is crucial for the success of many enterprise applications and this is even more important with Silverlight because it runs within the client browser and with the limitations of the security sandbox. Profiling Silverlight applications is a proactive step to ensure your applications are fine-tuned to deliver the best possible experience to the customer. Read as Jeremy Likness details everything you need to know to profile Silverlight 4 applications within Visual Studio 2010.

Using TFS to Manage Distributed Teams

Distributed development teams are becoming more popular as technologies like Microsoft Office Live Meeting have evolved to provide rich experiences for sharing video, audio, documents, and whiteboards. The Microsoft Visual Studio application lifecycle management (ALM) team is keeping pace with this trend and the latest version of Team Foundation Service (TFS) is packed with features that facilitate the coordinate and management of distributed teams. How does a team stay on track and under budget when the designer lives in Washington, the database architect lives in Florida and several of the key developers are overseas? Read as Jeremy Likness solves these dilemmas and shares features that ship with Visual Studio 2010 and TFS that will help you collaborate remotely.

Introduction to Visual Studio’s new Scrum 1.0 template

Visual Studio’s new Scrum 1.0 template is the perfect template for agile managers. It combines a simple, flexible, and easy to use interface with powerful reports and work item types to help manage scrum-based projects. Read this article as Jeremy Likness shares how this certified template can help you implement the scrum methodology within Visual Studio, as he provides a game plan for utilizing the template so that you can begin using this powerful, integrated toolset to help you meet your goals.

Inversion of Control with the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)

Building modular and extensible applications in .NET is much easier now with the inclusion of the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) in .NET 4.0. Read as Jeremy Likness explains why MEF is also the perfect solution for inversion of control, showing how to use it in .NET applications.

How to Develop Applications Targeting both Silverlight and WPF

With the release of Silverlight 2 and Silverlight 3, the gap between Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) has shrunk by a large margin. That gap does still exist though and there are many scenarios where a light browser-based interface, a heavy feature-rich desktop interface, or both is warranted. It's that last scenario, where both a Silverlight and WPF version of an application will be developed, read as Steve Porter covers this in his SearchWinDevelopment.com tip.

How to Write an Out-of-Browser Silverlight 3 Application in 3 Steps

With the release of Silverlight 3 Beta 1, Microsoft introduced the ability for Silverlight applications to run out of the browser. These "out of browser", or OOB for short, Silverlight applications are installed and have associated shortcuts just like traditional Windows applications. OOB Silverlight applications are still limited by the same security sandbox as their "in browser" counterparts, so all the security and local access rules still apply as if they were running inside of a browser.

 

As cool as the ability to run Silverlight application out of the browser is, Microsoft went one better by introducing functionality to run OOB applications offline. There are several different implementations and options for OOB disconnected Silverlight applications, but updating an existing Silverlight 3 application to run disconnected can be achieved in just three easy steps. Read this article as Steve Porter shares these three easy steps to writing an Out-of-Browser Silverlight Application.

How to Encode Video Markers for Consumption in Silverlight and WPF

Maybe you want a caption to display beside a video at a certain point or for some animation to start once a video has reached an important part. Read this .NET Development tip from Steve Porter that was recently published on SearchWinDevelopment.com. Learn as Steve discusses how to use a tool such as Microsoft’s Expression Encoder to encode time-based markers in your videos. He will also discuss how to develop applications in Silverlight or Windows Presentation Foundation to respond to these encoded markers.

Q&A: Why Microsoft TSF 2010 Improvements and WPF Base Matter to Visual Studio Developers

What's changed in Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 and why are those changes important to Visual Studio 2010? Read as Steve Porter explains the significance of part of Visual Studio 2010 being built on Windows Presentation Foundation in this interview with Rob Barry.

Microsoft MVP Surveys Visual Studio 2010's Debugging, Test Tools

Read what Wintellect’s Steve Porter has to say about Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010 in this interview with Rob Barry. In this Q&A, he points out new VS 2010 enhancements that streamline development and gives his verdict on the release's performance abilities.

Introduction to Using Prism with Silverlight 3

Read this article by Wintellect’s Rik Robinson as he details the key benefits that Prism offers. Microsoft's patterns and practices group designed Prism, formally known as the Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight, to help you build modular Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight client applications more easily.

 

Prism promotes modularity through the various classes and services it provides in the Composite Application Library (CAL). It gives the ability to compose the overall UI using independent views. It offers extensibility through the various interfaces and base classes provided, and it lets you adopt as little or as much of it as you need in your application without having to include the entire CAL. Prism's chief goal is to offer guidance for building composite applications.