JohnPapa.net

Astoria and Silverlight at Melbourne’s Space Coast .NET User Group

John Papa — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 04:33:00 GMT

This Wednesday evening at 6:30pm, thanks to the good people of INETA, I will be presenting ADO.NET Data Service and Silverlight at the Space Coast .NET User Group in Melbourne, Florida. I really enjoyed the group last year when I spoke about the Entity Framework. If you are in the area, drop by … I’ll also be giving away some copies of my Silverlight book too.

ADO.NET Data Services (codenamed Astoria) exposes entity models through RESTful services. It can dramatically simplify the code required to expose business objects through web services and reduce a tremendous amount of code. This session will show how to expose entity models using ADO.NET Data Services, how to consume and save data, and how to debug the communications using various tools. When the technology does not quite do what you need out of the box, it also allows for customizations to create custom service operations, intercept queries, and enforce permissions. Attendees will walk away with an understanding of the capabilities of ADO.NET Data Services, how to use them with Silverlight, and when and where it is ideal to use in an application architecture and when there are better options.

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Fill My Prism Region, Please

John Papa — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 04:21:00 GMT

I’ve been working on fine tuning a Silverlight progress control for an article with Simple-Talk.com. Along the way I wanted to create a background that dims the entire page while the progress control is up and running. Easy stuff … just stick it in a Grid panel with HorizontalAlignment and VerticalAlignment set to Stretch. Works like a charm … except when it doesn’t :)

Enter regions in Prism … they are a very cool concept, kind of like a special zone in your app where you can place Views. In this case I have a Prism region I want to stick my Progress Control View in. Regions come out of the box in the form of either a ContentControl, TabControl, ItemsControl or Selector. None of these allowed me to stretch the control to the entire region.

According to the Prism docs, ContentControl is intended to store a single item. When I used this for my control, it put it in the upper left. Not good for what I needed. The Prism docs says the ItemsControl allows adding multiple views into a region (it is an items control after all). Not what I was looking for, but I tried it and of course it added the item to the top of a list (of 1) and centered my control horizontally, but not vertically. The Selector had similar results. And of course the TabControl region was not what I was looking for.

So … what to do … I decided to create a Region Adapter that is based off of the Grid. The Grid does exactly what I want in this case, it lets me put my progress control with a Rectangle background to fill and stretch to the entire region. The Prism docs explain that the 4 region types are all created using the RegionAdapter and that you can extend your own. My class does not need to do everything a Grid does, I just want a single column and a single row Grid panel. (Of course it can be extended to handle this if need be.)

The first step is to create a new class and derive from RegionAdapterBase<T>. In this case T is a Grid and I name my new class GridRegionAdapter. The code below is pretty straightforward, the important part is to implement the Adapt method. This is the method that fires when you add, remove, replace items from your region container. Since I just care about 1 row and 1 column, this is very straightforward.

     using System.Windows;

    using System.Windows.Controls;

    using Microsoft.Practices.Composite.Presentation.Regions;

    using Microsoft.Practices.Composite.Regions;

    namespace MyUI.Infrastructure

    {

        public class GridRegionAdapter : RegionAdapterBase<Grid>

        {

            public GridRegionAdapter(IRegionBehaviorFactory behaviorFactory) :

                base(behaviorFactory)

            {

            }

            protected override void Adapt(IRegion region, Grid regionTarget)

            {

                region.Views.CollectionChanged += (s, e) =>

                            {

                            //Add

                            if (e.Action == System.Collections.Specialized.NotifyCollectionChangedAction.Add)

                                foreach (FrameworkElement element in e.NewItems)

                                    regionTarget.Children.Add(element);

                            //Removal

                            if (e.Action == System.Collections.Specialized.NotifyCollectionChangedAction.Remove)

                                foreach (FrameworkElement element in e.OldItems)

                                     if (regionTarget.Children.Contains(element))

                                         regionTarget.Children.Remove(element);

                            };

            }

            protected override IRegion CreateRegion()

            {

                return new AllActiveRegion();

            }

        }

    }

Now that the adapter exists, I can now use a Grid as a type of container in my Prism app and have my my control fill the entire screen.

The last step is to register the adapter in your Prism application. This can be done by adding the following code to the bootstrapper class.

    protected override RegionAdapterMappings ConfigureRegionAdapterMappings()

    {

        RegionAdapterMappings mappings = base.ConfigureRegionAdapterMappings();

        mappings.RegisterMapping(typeof(Grid), Container.Resolve<GridRegionAdapter>());

        return mappings;

    }

It is quite simple to extend and create your own Region Adapters. However, I cannot stress enough that you need to carefully implement the Adapt method to handle everything your container needs to do. So just be careful to make sure it covers your bases.

Turning off Cider

John Papa — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 17:58:00 GMT

If you work with Silverlight a lot like I do, you might be frustrated with the time it takes Visual Studio to try to render the preview of your Silverlight Views. This can be a painful process, especially when the View gets more complicated … because sometimes Visual Studio cannot even display the preview. Also, whenever the XAML page is opened in Visual Studio, it takes a while to "try" to display the View in preview mode.

There really is no value in the preview mode (aka Cider) with Silverlight and Visual Studio 2008, so I prefer to turn it off in Visual Studio and just use Blend to design the View. If you turn off Cider in Visual Studio, you can still edit the XAML in Visual Studio, but without the hassle of waiting for the preview to try to render. To do this follow these steps:

Go to Visual Studio's Tools menu
Choose Options
Choose Text Editor
Choose XAML
Choose Miscellaneous
Check the box shown below that says "Always open documents in full XAML view"
Click OK

Build an Out Of Browser Client with Silverlight 3

John Papa — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 02:15:00 GMT

My Data Points column in the June 2009 issue of MSDN Magazine is now online. In this issue I demonstrate how to build an out of browser application using Silverlight 3 and demonstrate how the API works under different circumstances.

I demonstrate the features using a Silverlight Twitter client (a light weight client I might add) that uses offline storage of data when the app is offline, and it also displays the network status. I hope you enjoy it!

Entity Framework Gotchya Revisited

John Papa — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 23:38:00 GMT

This is not the first time I have hit this issue, and it has been documented by people like Julie Lerman … but for my own sake I decided to blog about it in case I hit it again. It seems like I run into this issue just about the time I forget how to resolve it :)

The problem sometimes occurs with the Entity Framework where it gives an array of errors when doing simple operations. For example, I received an error about not being able to “unable to load the specified metadata resource”. Uh, the connection string information is right in the config file! The problem often can be resolved simply by:

open the EDMX file in the designer mode
go to the properties of the EDMX
set the Metadata Artifact Processing property to “Copy to Output”
build the project
go back and change the property to the appropriate setting of “Embed in Output Assembly”

I’ve only hit this a few times but when i get this error, this has always resolved the problem for me.

Improved Blend 3 Asset Library

John Papa — Mon, 25 May 2009 15:53:00 GMT

Check out this post by Unni (Program Manager with the Blend team). It’s a visual thing, yes, but it makes it easier to find the items in Blend. I’ll come clean right now … several times I have not been able to find an asset I was looking for because I forgot to check the right box or click the right option in the Asset Library in Blend. This rearranged window is so much more intuitive to me. Kudos to the Blend team!

Blend 3

Tips: Silverlight and ADO.NET Data Services

John Papa — Fri, 15 May 2009 04:23:00 GMT

I took a break from blogging (and most everything else) for a few weeks to spend some time with my family and enjoy our new son. Yep, after 3 girls we had a boy! Everyone is healthy and we are now a happy and larger family.

I’ve been digging my way out of a pile of “things to do” and realized that I had missed my article in the April 2009 MSDN Magazine issue. In that issue I wrote an article titled “Using Silverlight 2 with ADO.NET Data Services” in my Data Points column, the article addresses some common issues that arise when dealing with these technologies such as cross domain communications, passing sensitive data, deferred loading, and saving data (too many examples show retrieval only).You can give it a read over here.

WCF Binary Bindings in Silverlight 3

John Papa — Fri, 15 May 2009 02:10:00 GMT

One of the most common comments I hear form people when they start digging into Silverlight 3 Beta (and Silverlight 2) is the lack of WCF binding options. Some changes have been made to include binary encoding in Silverlight 3, so now we have:

customBinding
- can do things like binary binding with WCF clients
- new to Silverlight 3 Beta
basicHttpBinding
- basic clear text binding
pollingDuplexHttpBinding
- exactly what it says … a pseudo duplex basic binding that uses polling

Custom binding with binary encoding is nice if you want to do binary encoding of the message. In fact, this is the default binding that is created when you use a Silverlight enabled WCF file template in Visual Studio 2008 to create a WCF service. Binary encoding often offers performance gains over text encoding. Here is a quick glimpse at the config setup for the binding

     <system.serviceModel>

        <behaviors>

            <serviceBehaviors>

                <behavior name="SilverlightApplication2.Web.Service1Behavior">

                    <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true" />

                    <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="false" />

                </behavior>

            </serviceBehaviors>

        </behaviors>

        <bindings>

            <customBinding>

                <binding name="customBinding0">

                    <binaryMessageEncoding />

                    <httpTransport />

                </binding>

            </customBinding>

        </bindings>

        <serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true" />

        <services>

            <service behaviorConfiguration="SilverlightApplication2.Web.Service1Behavior"

                name="SilverlightApplication2.Web.Service1">

                <endpoint address="" binding="customBinding" bindingConfiguration="customBinding0"

                    contract="SilverlightApplication2.Web.Service1" />

                <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange" />

            </service>

        </services>

    </system.serviceModel>

There is a nice blog post from Yavor Georgiev, (Program Manager on the Connected Framework Team) that explains this in more detail. You can also view Eugene Ovosvetsky’s (also of Microsoft) presenting his Consuming Web Services in Silverlight 3 session at Mix 2009 … this session covers binary encoding as well as other new networking features.

1st Annual Silverlight MIXer

John Papa — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 04:57:00 GMT

Here is just one story of 3 incredibly fun hours spent at MIX09. I was told by many of the attendees that they had a blast … I know I sure did! I want to thank everyone who came, the sponsors, and everyone who helped make it possible.

As I started organizing my schedule for MIX09 I realized that there were more people I wanted to meet than I had time. Many of these people, but not all, are gurus in various areas in Silverlight and WPF. Some are vendors with cool products, some are uber technical wizards, some are amazing designers, but all of them are key Silverlight influencers who I wanted to meet face to face at MIX. When I saw the idea floated around that someone should gather these people together … I decided to make it happen … the result is the 1st annual Silverlight MIXer.

So this year at MIX I had the honor of organizing the 1st annual Silverlight MIXer at MIX09.

Before I go any further I want to recognize and thank the sponsors of the Silverlight MIXer 2009.

Platinum sponsors:

Microsoft

DevExpress

Infragistics

Telerik

Silver Sponsors

INETA

SilverlightShow

The sponsors were instrumental in making this event happen and were all very generous with their donations. They all chipped in and gave each attendee some great gifts (I supplied the bags). We had a raffle for the attendees too which included several expensive software suites donated by Infragistics and Telerik, a MacBook Air donated by DevExpress, and a Kindle 2 donated by all of the sponsors in collaboration. In addition to the gift bags, Tim Sneath and Adam Kinney got Microsoft to give each attendee a blue Zune (in honor of Silverlight)! The gifts and raffle items were completely optional and all of the sponsors really came through.

The Silverlight MIXer was a gathering of some of the most influential Silverlight and WPF gurus in all the land. I worked with Adam Kinney, Tim Heuer, and several others to try to make sure I invited as many key Silverlight Influencers as possible. The trick of course was to get funding for an awesome party where we could gather, have fun, want to stick around the whole time, and actually hear ourselves. It sounds simple, but if you ever go to a major conference party you know the hardest part is actually hearing the people over the music and noise.

We chose the patio Dal Toro Ristorante as the location of the event, which conveniently is within the Palazzo Hotel (connected to the Venetian Hotel). The Dal Toro patio overlooks the strip (within 30 feet of it actually), gives a great view of the Treasure Island pirate ship show, and has an exotic car gallery adjacent to it (including Ferrari, Lamborghini, Lotus, Bugatti, and many other exotic cars). Of course, we had a ton of food and drinks too :)

I hired an event coordinator, Suzanne Hogan of Milk and Honey Events, to help put all of the finishing touches on the event. She did a fantastic job and contributed in dozens of areas. Suzanne has run events for years and did a bang up job for us.

We had an amazing 95% +/- attendance of those who RSVP’d … and most everybody stuck around for the entire night. It went so well that we extended the event and arranged with the Dal Toro to give everyone access to the 2 exotic car showrooms to take photos afterwards.

So did the Silverlight MIXer serve its purpose? I believe it did … the people were great and the conversations were awesome. I can’t wait til next year!

Here is a photo collage from the Silverlight MIXer … click on it to open a very large version of it. I think I got them all in, but don’t hold me to it :)

Some Silverlight Gurus at MIX During Keynote

John Papa — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 16:12:00 GMT

Some great Silverlight gurus at the MIX keynote, getting there early for some good seats. Pete Brown, Jay Kimble, Nikita, Bryant Likes, Page Brooks, Frank LaVigne, Dave Campbell, Bill Buxton and more!

Bill Buxton on stage …

6 degrees of separation …

Sidewinder demo … very cool!

The menu itself for sidewinder, built with SketchFlow, Silverlight 3 and Blend 3 …

SketchFlow in Blend …