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1. Introduction

Currently Silverlight supports two ways of duplex communication: sockets and WCF polling duplex services. I was really impressed by the simplicity of using WCF polling duplex in Silverlight 3, but its responsiveness and scalability leaves much to be desired. On the opposite site we have sockets, which are rather tricky to use, but their responsiveness and scalability satisfy real world application requirements.

In this article I’m going to introduce my SocketsLight framework, which should simplify the working with sockets by providing high level API over .NET sockets library.

As you may already know, we are merging Silverlight Contrib and Silverlight Extensions into one super-ultra-mega project.  Last month, we held a poll to let the community decide the name of the consolidated project. 

I've yet to cover the all features of nRoute in depth, but since a lot of people are downloading the framework and the demo app, I thought let me step through the demo app to at least provide a rounded overview of the features in nRoute. I will headline each significant part, and highlight the relevant aspects in the code.

Introduction

In Part 7.1 of this series I looked at the importance of styling your Silverlight applications. In this article I will be taking a look at fashions in user interface design of late, and what basic elements can be identified as working towards beautiful and functional applications. Also I will address some of the “controversy” from my previous article and provide some opinions and responses to the comments I received.

Before we start, I have a disclaimer. I’m a developer, not a graphics designer – so I’m writing these styling articles from a developer’s perspective (and with the same limited graphical design skills many other developers share).

Ork Pad has a great post about nRoute and Behaviors. You may also be interested in Ork's previous posts called "nRoute: Silverlight abstractions of the higher kind" and "Introducing nRoute: an application-flow framework for Silverlight and WPF".

As weird as the title sounds, I love what behaviours using attached properties bring to Silverlight and WPF. They are kind of what Javascript is to HTML elements - the wonder that extends controls beyond their limited initial intentions.

Now, with respect nRoute, what I did was map every event in almost all the controls in SL 2 base library to do three things, one navigate, two take an action and three execute an ICommand (sorry this is like a little mantra I keep repeating).

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.

Microsoft .NET RIA Services simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms. RIA Services provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to data for queries, changes and custom operations. It also provides end-to-end support for common tasks such as data validation, authentication and roles by integrating with Silverlight components on the client and ASP.NET on the mid-tier.

Tim Heuer has posted a video in which is shown how easy it is to use the framework of IdeaBlade to enable rapid business application development with data.

I am really, really excited about this platform that Ward showed me and I think that you will be as well.