Part 6 of my series on WCF RIA Services is now live here:

http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/WCF-RIA-Services-Part-6-Validating-Data.aspx

In this episode, I explore the awesome validation infrastructure of RIA Services, one of my favorite benefits of RIA Services. I show how to use the built-in validation attributes of the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace on both the client and server side, how to use custom validation via attributes, how to invoke validation logic on the server side and return errors that get automatically associated with the entities client side, and how to use Invoke methods to call async validation logic from the client.

Check it out!

Saturday, August 28, 2010 1:58:09 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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Yesterday I was getting frustrated wading through the dozens of Silverlight controls in my toolbox trying to spot one I needed, and it occurred to me that there “ought to be an add-in to search the toolbox”. Just to make sure I wasn’t missing something, I contacted Karl Shifflett from the Cider team, who has written some awesome extensions to Cider and the XAML editor himself. He reached out to the right people on the VS team, and lo and behold, there is already a hidden search feature there.

You can read about it here. Thanks Karl and Josh!!

Saturday, August 21, 2010 2:51:17 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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From October 11-15 I’ll be conducting a WCF Master Class in Minneapolis. This class covers the breadth and depth of WCF all in one week. You can find the course information here.

If you want to get to the expert level with WCF in a week’s span, this is the class for you. We have been teaching an evolving version of this class since before WCF was released in 2006. It gets rave reviews every time, as long as you are not opposed to some hard core, in depth, fill your brain until it is ready to burst kind of learning.

If you have any questions about the content, you can contact me on twitter @briannoyes.

Hope to see you there.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010 6:51:39 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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Part 5 of my 10 part series on WCF RIA Services is now up on The Silverlight Show at http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/WCF-RIA-Services-Part-5-Metadata-and-Shared-Classes.aspx.

In this article, I explain the role and use of metadata classes to add attributes and functionality to existing entity classes that you cannot easily modify directly, such as the properties on an Entity Framework entity. Additionally, I show how you can define chunks of shared code on the server side and how they become available client side through the RIA Services code generation.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010 5:38:47 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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Part 4 of my series of WCF RIA Services is now live on The Silverlight Show here.

In this episode, I focus on using RIA Services in an MVVM world. That includes not using the DomainDataSource anymore and encapsulating the domain context in your view model and making the calls through it from there. You can expose the entity collections from the domain context directly as properties on the view model because they are a collection that raises CollectionChanged events when the underlying data changes, and the entities implement INotifyPropertyChanged so they participate nicely with data binding. They also implement INotifyDataErrorInfo and integrate nicely with the Silverlight data binding mechanisms.

The only downside to that approach is that you cannot easily mock out the domain context dependency, so it makes it hard to unit test your view model, which is one of the motivations for using the view model pattern in the first place. At the end of the article I point to a recommended solution from the RIA Services team – specifically to mock out the DomainClient that sits on the other side of the domain context and makes the actual service calls. That is not super easy, but it is at least a solution. I’m going to expand my sample to include that approach in Part 8 of the series.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

Wednesday, August 04, 2010 4:11:27 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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I was recently interviewed on the Silverlight TV show hosted by John Papa and the episode went live today.

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/SilverlightTV/Understanding-the-Value-of-Prism-Silverlight-TV-37/

In the interview, we discuss some of the motivations for adopting Prism:

• Managing large projects
• Distributed teams
• Packaging functionality for different deployments per customer
• Separation of concerns for maintainability
• Testability
• Extensibility

I quickly walk through the features and how they manifest themselves in your solutions. I also discuss a little of what the team is working on in Prism 4 – specifically the MVVM pattern and using MEF for modularity.

Check it out and let me know what you think!

Friday, July 23, 2010 12:59:18 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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Last night I spoke to a great crowd at a joint meeting of the San Diego Connected Systems and Architecture SIGs. I talked about WCF RIA Services and focused on the internals of what is going on with deferred execution queries, metadata for entities, and the services under the covers, as well as exposing OData, SOAP, and JSON endpoints and consuming them.

Here are the slides and demos.

Thursday, July 15, 2010 2:18:29 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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I gave a talk on Monday evening at the Los Angeles .NET Users Group on WCF RIA Services, MVVM, and MEF. I was insanely ambitious thinking I could cover all those in one talk, but it was a fun talk nonetheless. It was a very interactive crowd with a lot of great questions about Silverlight in general, RIA Services, Entity Framework and other broader technology topics.

Here are the slides and demos.

Thursday, July 15, 2010 2:10:03 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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In conjunction with the 10 part series on WCF RIA Services in am part way through writing for the Silverlight Show, I also did a short interview with them about RIA Services, Silverlight in general, and my background. You can find that interview here: http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/SilverlightShow-Interview-Featured-Article-Author-Brian-Noyes.aspx

Sunday, July 11, 2010 2:32:28 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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Not too long ago I made the plunge and bought a MacBook Pro, the first Mac I have ever owned. I did so for two reasons. First and foremost, I am starting to develop applications for the iPhone and iPad (two devices I can’t live without), and developing on a Mac is the only choice thanks to the closed platform and development tools approach of Apple. Secondly, I thought it would be interesting to see what computer life is like on the other side of the fence. I’ve heard so many stories of how great the Mac is, I thought I would try to experience it first hand.

So for the last month I have tried using my MacBook Pro as my primary machine – not booting to Windows, but running Mac OS X and using Parallels to get to the Windows apps I can’t live without.

After a month, I’m switching back to my Dell Latitude E6500 as my primary machine and my MacBook Pro will just be used for reason #1 – developing for iPhone/iPad.

When I tweeted (@briannoyes) that I was switching back, I got a lot of “why??” questions, so I thought I would share my experience for others who are pondering a similar change.

Some important caveats up front:

• I am first and foremost a Windows developer and software architect. That is my profession and my passion and what I have been focusing on for almost two decades.
• I have dozens of Windows applications that I used at least once a month and at least 20 or so that I use every week. While I realize there are many equivalent Mac programs for many of those, I don’t want to have to buy all of those, and for many there is not (i.e. Windows development tools).
• I don’t just work on one machine and have no intention of switching all of my computing to Apple. While I love my iPad and iPhone, I have a Windows 7 desktop machine in my home office that I use when not traveling, and when traveling (75%+ of my time) I often carry a second laptop for various reasons and that one would certainly be a Windows machine.
• From a performance perspective, my point of comparison and what I have switched back to is a 6 month old Dell Latitude E6500 that is maxed out. My MacBook Pro has slightly better hardware specs (i7 processor), but same 256 GB SSD drive and 8 GB memory.
• I was afraid of using Boot Camp to boot to Windows directly because of witnessing and hearing about numerous projection issues when running Windows through Boot Camp on Mac Books. A significant majority of my professional work involves projecting (teaching, consulting, presenting at conferences and user groups). I can’t travel with a machine I can’t trust will project anywhere through any projector with no issues.
• I’ve been using Office 2010 for a while, so that is my standard of comparison for routine business tasks (email, writing, presentations, spreadsheets).

So what did I like:

• General user experience is very nice at the OS level.
• iTunes runs much smoother on the Mac than on Windows
• Parallels integration with the Mac OS is very smooth and seamless
• Er… ummm… OK, nothing else jumping out that I found superior to anything I do on Windows 7.

What I did not like:

• Built in apps (email, calendar, etc.) had no where near the functionality or user experience of Office 2010. Office 2008 for Mac is not as good either, and I still have to co-exist with several Windows PCs. Worrying about file conversions and potential data loss is just not worth it.
• A lot of my Windows apps could not run from the shared Mac OS folders, so had to move things onto the virtual C: drive a lot to get things to run, aggrevating file synchronization issues and leading to duplicate files and drive usage.
• Keyboard lacks many common keys that PC keyboards have (Del, Home, End, PgUp, PgDn, etc). You have to use the Fn key to get other keys to do those things, and you have to use the Fn key to get the function keys to act as function keys instead of volume, etc shortcut keys. These keys are all way too important to me as a coder to have to use the extra key to get to them, especially since I also work a lot on PCs and have to switch my brain back and forth. Likewise the differences of what the Control, Alt/option, and Command keys do in Mac vs Windows (in parallels) drive me bonkers trying to keep straight. Many a wasted minute thinking I copied things to the clipboard and I didn’t or getting things to select correctly.
• Perf: even though the Mac had a better processor and equal memory / disk, everything felt a lot more sluggish on it, and I’m not just talking about the Windows apps running in Parallels. Copying files to external USB drives (which I had to do a lot for syncing files between machines) was significantly slower than on PC.
• File synchronization: I use Dropbox to sync files between my machines, but the difference in file systems led to some oddities that that were annoying at best and could lead to data loss if not closely managed. Syncing with external drives also took closer attention than I wanted to give it. I don’t want to have to think at all about moving files around, and from PC to PC I don’t.

So bottom line, I decided I can’t live on a Mac as my primary machine for the reasons outlined above. I am convinced that if you only have to use one machine and are willing to invest in getting all the apps you need as Mac apps, and can live 80% or more of your computer life using Mac apps, then it is a nice platform. That is just not me, so I am happily back in my comfort zone on all Windows 7 machines + a MacBook Pro as an iPad/iPhone development box.

Thursday, July 08, 2010 4:55:03 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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