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I have been developing a Silverlight business application and one of the problems I have found is the “inconsistency” of the DataGrid… at least of some of its behaviors, when I click on a row, I expect that the SelectedItem (the clicked one) is set on the corresponding DataGrid property.

But it does not. at least not “always”, lets be clear maybe I’m doing something wrong but this randomness on this behavior is driving me crazy, if I click on a Grid row, it should select it and mark the SelectedItem on the corresponding property, right? 

John and Brian discuss what Prism is, when to use it, when not to use it, and how to pick and choose which parts of Prism may be of most value to your application.

Prism is made up of various parts including modularity, regions, the shell, commanding, events/messaging. Brian explains and demonstrates how each of these concepts is tackled by Prism 2.2 and some possible future plans for Prism 4. 

Recently, we came across a bug with the Silverlight Business Application with respect to an Out of Browser application. In the RTM bits for Silverlight 4 Tools a new feature was added to enable a better debugging experience with Out of Browser application. The feature basically launched the app in OOB window when run with the debugger attached. If you have tried that with the business application template, you will notice that the app does not run. It crashes with an exception, that the URI path is not valid.

If you're using the Silverlight Business Application template, you may have also noticed the recently-released Silverlight 4 Theme Refresh:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e9da0eb8-f31b-4490-85b8-92c2f807df9e&displaylang=en

As an experiment, I wanted to move the Navigation links to the left-hand-side of the display, to allow more flexibility to add links at a later stage.

This sample application is the result of my initiative to learn Silverlight and WCF RIA Services. With my background of using WPF and MVVM for the past several years, I found that there is a lack of sample LOB applications that can combine the latest Silverlight enhancements with MVVM. This three part article series is my effort at creating such a sample. The choice of an issue tracking application comes from David Poll's PDC09 talk, and the design architecture is from Shawn Wildermuth's blog posts.

Coming soon...

Product Description

Silverlight 4 has the potential to revolutionize the way we build business applications. With its flexibility, web deployment, cross-platform capabilities, rich .NET language support on the client, rich user interface control set, small runtime, and more, it comes close to the perfect platform in which to build business applications. It’s a very powerful technology, and despite its youth, it’s moving forward at a rapid pace and is gaining widespread adoption.

This book will guide you through the process of designing and developing enterprise-strength business applications in Silverlight 4 and C#. You will learn how to take advantage of the power of Silverlight to develop rich and robust business applications, from getting started to deployment, and everything in between.

In particular, this book will serve developers who want to learn how to design business applications, and introduce the patterns to use, the issues that you’ll face, and how to resolve them. Chris Anderson, who has been building line-of-business applications for years, demonstrates his experience through a candid presentation of how to tackle real-life issues, rather than just avoid them. Developers will benefit from his hard-won expertise through business application design patterns that he shares throughout the book.

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You can use the 8 modules, 25 videos, and several hands on labs online or offline from links on the Channel 9 site. I’ve included a breakdown and links to all of the content here in this post. The key to this training material is not the features it covers (though it covers a variety of topics including the features in this cloud) but rather that it teaches from the perspective of building a business application.

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Updating data is great, but when you enable data update you often need to check the data to ensure it is valid.  RIA Services as clean, prescriptive pattern for handling this. First let’s look at what you get for free. The value for any field entered has to be valid for the range of that data type. For example, you never need to write code to ensure someone didn’t type is “forty-two” into a textbox bound to an int field. You also get nice looking and well behaved validation exposure in the UI.