Silverlight for Business

Thanks everyone who attended my talk at the Silverlight User Group last night.  I really enjoyed myself and was glad to see a hearty discussion around RIA services – which is surely the point of these sorts of events; to get everyone thinking and get the dialog going.

You can download my presentations from here: http://bit.ly/SlugSep09IB 

Ria Services

If you want to find out more about Ria Services then Brad Adams is the person to go to – if you haven’t seen his blog series that followed on from his Mix09 series then check that out now; it consists of >20 posts covering everything from using a ViewModel,  azure, authentication, multiple clients and data sources, SEO, Unit testing and much more.  And it’s ongoing with promises of new posts on modular development (will be interesting to see how that relates to Prism).  He has a summary of the current posts here: http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2009/08/02/business-apps-example-for-silverlight-3-rtm-and-net-ria-services-july-update-summary.aspx.

SilverlightPulse.net

I have placed the app on http://silverlightpulse.codeplex.com/  – if you haven’t used codeplex before it is Microsoft’s Open source repository – you can use a range of clients such as svn, team system etc to work with the source.  I have published under the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) which is the most permissive Open Souce MS license as I understand it

Anyone who is interested in helping out please get in touch (Ian@bbits.co.uk) – it would be really great to take this app and make it a great showcase for members of the Silverlight User Group in the UK.  There are lots of things we could explore both functionally (eg wordle maps, integrating other network api’s such as friendfeed, using the silverlight bing map), and technically (using Prism for modularity seems like a great fit, having more server processing to aggregate data for all perhaps (instead of doing the work on the client), adopting MVVM,  are a few that come to mind.  I actually think this could develop into something really interesting and I am sure there will be many ideas from the community that could be used.  Get your thinking caps on and get in touch – please

Cheers

Ian

I am chuffed to be talking at the user group meeting tonight, along with Ian Smith.

Details here

I will be talking about two things :

Silverlightpulse.net

This was the micro app I created before the Mix 09 conference in anticipation for the Silverlight 3 announcements and why I was originally invited to talk at the user group meeting (it’s a bit of a long story as to why it has taken so long for that to actually materialize – filled with stories of product launches and twisted ankles!). 

I still think this is a very interesting app though, and has some potential that I have yet to realize.  Tonight I will be going into why I think that and asking: “is this a worthwhile community project and who wants to be involved?”

Using RIA Services with Silverlight

To me RIA services offer a prescriptive pattern that will be useful for a majority of projects.  ScottGu called out 80% as the take-up figure when he talked about it recently and John Papa said in a recent tweet “I think RIA Services could be the best thing to happen to Silverlight LOB apps”.  I agree, though some may not entirely.  I only have an hour in total this evening but I hope to give a flavour of RIA services and what it can bring to the party.

Hope to see you there!

Cheers

Ian

Thanks for everyone who entered the competition for a free ticket for the TDD Masterclass with Roy Osherove, 21-25 September in Kent, UK.

We had lots of entries and all the names were printed out and put into a bowl and then the winner was picked out at random by my 6 year old daughter this evening:

I am pleased to announce that the winner is : Sara Stephens!
http://developerdame.blogspot.com/2009/08/tdd-masterclass-in-uk-free-ticket.html

Congratulations to Sara!  Sara – I will send you a separate email with details of your free ticket   It promises to be a fantastic course!

Once again thank you everyone who supported this promotion.

If anyone would still like to come to the course there are still a few places left if you would like to come – please contact me directly if you are interested as soon as possible!

Cheers

Ian