Demos

Introduction

In this previous article we added a DomainDataSource control in our application and bounded it to a DataGrid and with their help we easily visualized our data. Now we are going to implement some more goodies into the application - sorting and filtering. We achieve that via the DomainDataSource control, as it provides such functionality and is really simple to use.

Here are some links to the previous articles if you have missed them:

Creating applications with .NET RIA Services Part 1 - Introduction

Creating applications with .NET RIA Services Part 2 - Creating the project

Creating applications with .NET RIA Services Part 3 - Adding a DomainService class

Creating applications with .NET RIA Services Part 4 - Adding a DomainDataSource

Here is a link to the live demo at this stage and the source code. Note that they will be updated with each article! ;)

Introduction

Yes, I was searching for months if there is any possibility to simple justify block text! And I didn’t find anything – except lots of posts like: “Why didn’t they implement it?”!

So I waited for Silverlight 3 Beta 1 to appear, and I began to hope and pray, but: Once again – there was nothing like block text. I was very disappointed. How should I display long text on the screen without clear formatting borders on both sides - and I don’t want to mix Silverlight and HTML again, either. I need this for building a web application composed of 100% Silverlight, and I don’t feel like doing the text-rendering and position-calculation by myself.

Introduction

Silverlight 3 beta is out and it introduces a great variety of new functionality. Tim Heuer has already published a guide to the new features in Silverlight 3.

Element effects in Silverlight 2 are missing. This means that if you want to make your elements more attractive, you have to write your own effects. Silverlight.FX introduced a great number of effects and animations, which you can use. Nikhil Kothari has written a number of posts to show you the capabilities of this small but powerful framework.

Introduction

By now we have discussed the preparations around the project, how to add a DomainService that contains our business logic and combine it with the entity framework. If you have missed one of the previous articles you can find them here:

Creating applications with .NET RIA Services Part 1 - Introduction

Creating applications with .NET RIA Services Part 2 - Creating the project

Creating applications with .NET RIA Services Part 3 - Adding a DomainService class

As you know from the previous articles in order to demonstrate the features of the .NET RIA Services I am creating the Web Administration Tool from ASP.NET in Silverlight. In this article I am going to create the Manage Users page and add the functionality needed to visualize Data. For that purpose I will need the DataGrid control, the new DataPager control and the DomainDataSource that is a part of the .NET RIA Services framework.

Here is a link to the live demo at this stage and the source code. Note that they will be updated with each article! ;)

Introduction

With the beta release of Silverlight 3 a lot of new goodies were introduced and one of them was the navigation framework and in the final release additional features were added. It allows us to easily implement navigation between the newly introduced Page controls in a Silverlight application, interacts with the Browser History journal and provides us with Uri mapping. To learn more about these features read on the article.

For this article the demo will be the Mini SilverlightShow application, which I used not a long time ago as a demo to my article about the Telerik's RadPageNavigation control.

Introduction

In Part 6 of this series I looked at implementing a means for displaying reports that appear to be within the application and permitting them to be printed. In each of the articles so far I have discussed major components of line of business application development, but have spent little or no time in styling the application in anticipation of writing an article dedicated to doing so. However that article has turned into seven articles which will become a mini-series within this existing series.

Introduction

This article continues the series of articles about the .NET RIA Services framework and Silverlight 3. The scope of it is the DomainService class, which is used to create the business logic of the application and how it combines with the ADO.NET Data Model and the Enitity framework.

Here is a link to the live demo at this stage and the source code. Note that they will be updated with each article! ;)

Here are links to the previous parts of the series:

Creating applications with .NET RIA Service  Part 1 - Introduction

Creating applications with .NET RIA Service  Part 2 - Creating the project

Introduction

With the help of the .NET RIA Services framework we are now capable of creating business applications in Silverlight easy and fast. But before starting we should download and install the latest versions of Silverlight 3 and .NET RIA Services. In this article you'll find the needed links and a brief walkthrough of creating the project for our first Silverlight application using the .NET RIA Services Framework, as well as some highlights and explanations about the created project.

Here is a link to the live demo at this stage and the source code. Note that they will be updated with each article! ;)

Here is a link to the first part of the series:

Creating applications with .NET RIA Service  Part 1 - Introduction

.NET RIA Services and Silverlight 3

Before beginning to code your first application, you have to download and install the Silverlight 3 Tools for Visual Studio, which contain the tools, the runtime and the SDK.

Several months ago the guys from Microsoft announced that they are developing a framework for developing Business applications under Silverlight with the codename Alexandria and now it's a reality! On the MIX'09 session a release of it under the name .NET RIA Services was announced.  The possibilities that the framework are really great and allow the Silverlight developers to easily develop business application in a much easier and faster way.

I am starting this series of articles in order to introduce the main features of the .NET RIA Services framework.

1. Introduction

Whatever software application you want to create, the most important problem that must be solved is the tight coupling. Mixing one layer with another is a very common mistake and it is the main reason for your application to be tightly coupled. For example: as a practical example in this article I will create a simple data entry application, which purpose is to load, create, edit, delete and save data. The most straightforward way to create the application is to put everything in the user interface (handling the button’s click events and writing the code there). It is the easiest way but it is far from the best. This will produce a low quality code and high complexity. And when the things are tightly coupled, one change can lead you into chasing breaking changes in the whole code. So the most important thing is to keep the layers separate, one layer – one responsibility. Yes, it is true, that creating an application with separate tiers requires additional work, but this may save you a headache in the future.

The most famous solutions and approaches (patterns) for creating a multi layer application are the MVC and MVP patterns. Since Silverlight does not require reinventing the wheel, these patterns and practices can be applied with great success when you create a Silverlight application. In previous articles I showed you how the Model-View-Presenter (MVP) pattern and the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern can be used in Silverlight. Today I decided to continue and to present you another pattern – it is the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM). MVVM is tailor-made for WPF and it is an adaptation of the MVC and MVP.

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