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Here at NeuroSpeech, we figured out the problem with forms based business applications that frustrates developers and change management is not only time consuming but its quite boring job to do.

Although WPF/Silverlight does offer very customizable UI designing platform but when we go on the field to develop ling of business applications, we realize that initial development hardly takes any time but maintenance is very difficult.

In its current form, Stuff is a demo application that allows you to store information about the movies you own.  It uses the Netflix OData cloud database for movie look up, which makes adding a movie to your collection very easy.

One goal for Stuff was that a developer could take the code, open it in Visual Studio 2010 and press F5 and run the application.  I didn’t want burden developers with setting up a database, creating an account to use an on-line service or have to mess with connection strings, etc.

This series will pretend that the design existed before we began coding, and will not take you through its evolution over the months between December 2009 and March 2010. In short, this series is a “drop-line” exercise highlighting how the program works with a focus on teasing out general principles of creating mid-sized line of business Silverlight applications.

The latest versions of Silverlight and WPF make it easier than ever to create compelling user interfaces. This presentation will cover advanced topics of these frameworks, with a special focus on features relevant to business applications. You will gain a solid understanding of virtualization, data validation, and other advanced areas that are sure to increase your productivity and effectiveness.

Introduction

The last few weeks have been very exciting. At PDC 2009 Microsoft announced WCF RIA Services which is now the official name of .NET RIA Services. Their intention is to emphasize how close RIA Services and WCF is. However there were minor changes to the API it didn’t affect my previous article so you can still consider it valid.

In my last article I wrote about the basic concepts of WCF RIA Services and n-tier development. In this one we’ll talk about the features of WCF RIA Services in terms of creating complex queries.

In my previous post, I wrote about “the first line of defense” against inputting invalid data in Silverlight applications (or any kind of application, for that matter) – preventing the user from entering invalid data through some an input form. Input form fields are commonly directly bound to the underlying object’s properties – either directly or through a of value converter – in both cases the entered value gets assigned to the bound object’s property; and this is exactly the place where we would want to put our second line of defense.

Introduction

In this series of articles we will talk about buildng N-Tier Silverlight business application, why we want to use multiple tiers, what problems we have to face and how .NET RIA Services can help us solve our issues.

Going N-Tier

If you develop complex business applications with a large codebase that can easily adapt to changing environments you introduce multiple tiers or layers. For example, you create a Data Access Layer that communicates with your data source whatever that is and passes the requested data to the layer above in object oriented form.

This is part 1 of a series of screencasts illustrating some of the ideas found in "Prism" or the "Composite Application Guidance" from the Patterns and Practices team that can be used to build Silverlight applications in a way that lends itself to testability and modularity.

Beat Kiener has posted a video from a LOB Silverlight App on which he is working at the moment.

Currently we are working an application for swisslogix.ch based on our new evidence nova Silverlight application framework.
The application is intended to optmize the waste-management in the public area. The RIA-Application mainly visualize the filling level of different waste containers in the public area, shows system levels information about waste containers (electric power state, service requests, malfunctions, etc) and provides forecasts at what time a container might be full. The application is a full-frame Silverlight 3 application and is mainly running on a Getac table PC.