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In the recent days an epocal change is becoming evident. If you tried to download the new Windows 8 Consumer Preview, available for free on Microsoft website, you know what I mean. The change, that is greatly focused on a new user experience, is driven by the growing power of portable devices that are becoming prevalent on common desktop and laptops. Up to the day before today, tablet PCs, smartphones, and generically speaking touch-enabled devices was expensive and not effective, but they are now something that common people start to take in serious consideration from the effectiveness perspective and also from the economical point of view.

LOB (Line of Business) applications executing within a web browser are fine, but if we think from the perspective of a final user, it is not the option that they would choose first. This is due to the fact that:

• Having a desktop application is easy. It can be directly accessed by double-clicking so that it is launched quickly.
• Most of the time, it is necessary to leave Silverlight sandbox application. This happens, for example, when we need to access the filesystem, or with a special hardware via COM (such as an ATM).

At the end of February, the official SilverlightShow Windows Phone app has been accepted into the Marketplace. The app gives you access to some of the content of this website, including news, articles and events, and is completely free for use (also ad-free!). Some of the convenience features include the possibility to create reminders for upcoming events and webinars directly on your phone, to get notifications about new content in the form of live tiles, and to maintain a local list of favorites that allows you to permanently store items for later reading.

Welcome to the fourth part of this article series on strategies for designing your application for a multitude of different clients.  In the first part, we’ve looked into the business case & some general concerns, and in the second part, we made a choice for a service layer: WCF RIA Services.  In the third part, we’ve seen how we can use MEF for on demand loading & code reuse across different clients.

However, I left out a few things in that article: loading the Views on demand (as it requires extensions to the Silverlight Navigation framework to navigate to Views in an assembly that’s loaded on demand), and loading multiple assemblies on demand (as we need an async component loader for that, to ensure we can load these assemblies at the same time instead of one by one).

One of the growing needs of these days, is the requirements of exposing services that are available to multiple platforms. This request come obviously from the increasing availability of a number of mobile platforms that is forcing companies to adopt strategies to decrease the complexity and use technologies that are able to respect the verb "write once and use everywhere".

Javascript object notation - or as everyone know for sure, JSON - is something that has emerged as the common denominator, when the need is to expose services and APIs that may be easily consumed by multiple platforms.

In the previous articles of this series we dealt with some introductory aspects such as how to integrate Silverlight into Sharepoint, then we built a Silverlight menu capable of interacting with a Sharepoint site as an example. Throughout this journey we have introduced some basic concepts of Sharepoint useful for Silverlight developers. Now it's time to dig into it at full throttle facing more advanced concepts. In this article we will become familiar with the Sharepoint event receivers, a cool feature which allows the user to be notified about various events occurring inside a Sharepoint environment.

In this SilverlightShow interview, we talk with Tim Huckaby – keynote speaker on the 3^rd day of Visual Studio Live! Las Vegas conference (March 26-30, 2012). The keynote will be focused on The Future of User Experience: The Natural User Interface (NUI).
As we have announced, SilverlightShow is the Social Media Premiere Partner for this conference and we are sending one SilverlightShow member to this conference for free. 

About Tim: Tim Huckaby is focused on the Natural User Interface (NUI)- Touch, Gesture, and Neural in Rich Client Technologies like HTML5, Silverlight, WPF, & IOS on a broad spectrum of devices that include computers, tablets, the Surface, the Kinect, and mobile devices.

In this SilverlightShow interview, we talk with Billy Hollis – the presenter at the most-awaited workshop at Visual Studio Live! Las Vegas conference (March 26-30, 2012) -  ‘Creating Today’s User Experiences - An Entry Point for Developers’.
As we have announced, SilverlightShow is the Social Media Premiere Partner for this conference and we’ll be sending one SilverlightShow member to this conference for free.

About Billy: Billy Hollis is an author and software developer from Nashville, Tennessee.

Real-time communication. Many software applications on variety of platforms & form factors have a genuine need for it. But persistent networks, real-time connectivity & asynchrony continue to challenge us developers in building such applications. Is there a silver lining? Could we have near-real-time communication in our mobile apps? Imagine the possibilities.

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Now, let’s do something a little fun before we get to the crux of what this article is about.