PeterKellner.net

As usual, Michael’s doing a great job of presenting enthusiastically the new Silverlight Analytics Frameworks.  I’m hugely impressed with how easy it is going to be to add analytics to a Silverlight app.  It seems Microsoft has gotten all the major vendors of Web Analytics to play.

One thing Michael said that really made me take notice is that all web pages should have a “Privacy Statement” prominently displayed on their main page.  It should say (and you need to abide by it) that you don’t track any user identifiable data associated with tracking data collected.  Great advice I won’t forget.

This article is very short.  In the actual presentation, there was not much time to talk about this so a brief overview was done.  Basically, it’s all standard WCF stuff.  The idea is that the Silverlight Business Template adds logging in and supports Authentication just like an asp.net application does.  It uses the DomainDataSource to do the bridging between the silverlight clientside app, and the web application.  Authorization is built into the login module also so that you can assign attributes to your domainservice classes to restrict access.

In this section, we will talk about what happens when the users presses the “Sessions” hyperlink from the speakers page.  If you remember from the last article, we used a special converter on the Speakers.xaml page and bound that to the hyperlink titled sessions as shown below.

In this article, we will  build from scratch, using Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 a simple application that lets us view Silicon Valley Code Camp Attendees that have authorized us to share their data.  We will be using no special RIA Services Visual Studio 2010 design tools to do this.  We will:

• Create the Entity Framework Repository
• Create the Domain Service
• Wire up an Appropriate Get Method that Returns in IQueryable
• Call From the Client Code the Domain Service
• Show The Results
• Observations

First, we need to create a new Visual Studio Project.  We do that by using the File/New Project and chose “Silverlight Business Application”.

In this article, we will use the the Visual Studio 2010 Beta2 Tooling to create a Sessions DataGrid.  We will add a Pager to it as well as a Silverlight busy indicator which will show while the data is loading.  In Article 1, we build a simple DataGrid with code behind, in this article, it will all be declarative in XAML built with the Visual Studio 2010 designer.

This series of video presentations goes through the process of building a Speaker and Sessions Viewer for Silicon Valley Code Camp’s data using Silverlight 4 and RIA Services (Using Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2).  It starts with a brief introduction of RIA Services and is followed by screen casts and blog posts the parallel each screen cast.

The actual presentation was done at the Microsoft office in San Francisco.

http://twitpic.com/pxclg

One of my goals for PDC this year has been to better understand the Microsoft data story about how to work with clients better (Silverlight, JavaScript, Forms, etc.).  RIA services has been on my radar for quite some time.  I was hoping to get some good conversations about this, but never expected to get almost an hour with Nikhil, the inventor of RIA services.

Last month, Michael Scherotter, a Microsoft Developer Evangelist and Silverlight expert did a great 2 day even in San Francisco on Silverlight.  His aim was to focus on designer, but as a developer, I like to see how the other half thinks.  Seemed like about 30 people were there and I’d say everyone got good stuff from it.  I had never met Michael before but have been a regular reader of his blog.  One of the things I really liked was that Mike seemed to have a great handle from both the dev side (like me) and the designer side.    His focus was around Expression Blend 2.5 Turns out he is an real architect (builds buildings not code) by training and from what I know, that brings a discipline into design that is similar to the way us Dev’s think.

We just wrapped up Silicon Valley Code Camp.  It was an awesome event.  This year was our second time around the block so the preparation wasn’t quite as draining as last year.  We did have a new dean (Timothy Woods) to work with at Foothill College and when we initially found that out, I was worried.  What if he doesn’t want to do this?  Well, turns out, that could not have further from the case.  Tim was a stellar partner and everything that could go right did.  The weather was perfect, lots of people chipped in for both planning as well as execution, and everything really came together.  We had over 900 registered, 75 sessions, and about 400 on Saturday attending and 250 on Sunday.

I’m Speaking at Silicon Valley Code Camp on Silverlight

Sunday at 1:15PM, October 27th. Foothill College

http://www.siliconvalley-codecamp.com

This coming Sunday, October 27th at 1:15PM, I’m giving a presentation about a Silverlight application I developed for Microsoft and Leverage Software.  It will be a pretty technical session on all the things I learned and the tricks I had to use to make things work.  The session can be found here.

Day 2 (Saturday) was packed full of interesting presentations.  From about 4:30 to 5:00, I did a presentation on how to build animations with blend and use them in Silverlight.  Here is the description:

For those that have never been to a Silverlight Dev Camp (OK, maybe nobody has ever been to one), this is an event where people on he (b)leading edge get together and talk about how much fun they are having and share war stories.  For me, life couldn’t get any better.  Well, as one of the other moderators on asp.net forums recently pointed out to me… Get a life.

Topic: Building animation into "Community Media Browser" for Leverage Software with Silverlight Alpha 1.1

Introduction

Searchlight was born from the desire to show the outstanding ability of Silverlight to create a compelling web application using existing infrastructure technology.  The products was developed working with Leverage Software, a
San Francisco company dedicated to delivering first class communities for it’s customer’s, Peter Kellner (the Silverlight technology guy), and Uday Gajendar, the design specialist.  Our efforts can be viewed by going to the LeverageSoftware Labs Link Here.  Simply follow the directions on that web page to run the web application. In this article, many of the Silverlight features in Searchlight are discussed.

Background

Searchlight was built to run with the first Alpha 1.1 version of Silverlight shipped from Microsoft.  Searchlight takes advantage of Leverage Software’s extensive web service api to provide real time data based on those web feeds.  Currently, Leverage Software’s  main access to the Dwell Community is an html application that can be found at
http://dwell.leveragesoftware.com/.  Using the Silverlight Alpha 1.1 combined with

I’m presenting a session on Silverlight 1.1 at Silicon Valley Code Camp October 27-28, 2007. this event will be held at Foothill College. If you can make it, please register here:

http://www.siliconvalley-codecamp.com/AttendeeRegistration.aspx

So, you might be wondering, what is a code camp, and what does it cost? Well, it’s completely free and completely staffed by volunteers. It’s a place you can share your passion for technology with others like yourself, it’s a place you can give a presentation on your favorite topic to a receptive audience, as well as go to sessions by others who want to share the knowledge. Typically, there are sessions on all kinds of technologies from Microsoft’s latest stuff to Java,
Ruby, Python, JavaScript, and even more obscure technologies. It’s basically formatted like a 1 day PDC/Teched/JavaOne style event where sessions are pre arranged and you just choose what interests you. Session sign up closes a week before the event so you know what you’ll be in for ahead of time and you can plan.

From Non-Local Servers Asynchronously

This issue has come up several times for me.  That is, you have an image  url you want to display in your silverlight .net 1.1 application that comes from  some foreign server.  That is, you want this to work:  (and of course
it does not).

The Problem

Project / Properties / Startup Options

All of a sudden, I could no longer debug my project. After poking around for a while, I discovered that if I went to the webserver projects property tab, startup options I had to select "Silverlight Project". I don’t remember unchecking this, but none the less, there you go.

I’m of course referring to my article of a couple days ago at: 

http://peterkellner.net/2007/06/18/silverlightdebugwebservicedotnet/

The Short Story:

So, I’m working on a Silverlight .net project where the main source of data is a webservice.  It’s not a huge amount of data, but it is not small either. In general it’s about 20K to 50K per download.  My original plan was to use the quickstart method (POX) and basically parse the xml using the XMLReader classes that are available on Silverlight.  That didn’t work so well for
me, so I switched to the proxy classes and did not have much more luck. The primary problem is I could not figure out how to debug the code on the Silverlight side.  Ultimately, I ended up figuring out how to do debugging and in the next few paragraphs I’ll go through the steps including screen shots showing how to do it.

At MIX07, Anand Iyer’s (Microsoft Developer Evangelist) interviewed both myself and Elisa Johnson (Microsoft Program Manager on the Data Programmability team about the conference. Except for me having trouble remembering the new name of WPF/E (Silverlight), it was a lot of fun. Elisa talks about upcoming projects out of her group, and I talk about the MVP program and a little about our upcoming code camp (end of October, Silicon Valley California).

The Podcast:  
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=306463

Introduction

Silverlight, is the new name for WPF/E which was formally introduced at the  MIX07 conference in Las Vegas a couple weeks ago.  Basically, it’s a stripped down version of full WPF Xaml that works on the web by installing a custom plug-in in them most popular browsers in a similar way to how flash works.  The great thing about this technology is that it works cross platform.  Mac’s, Linux, etc.  The other major announcement at MIX07  was that it supports programming in .NET.  This means that Silverlight applications can be developed in c#, my favorite programming language.  I’m not that great a JavaScript so this is great news for me because I want to be able to build highly interactive applications, and so far, with asp.net and little JavaScript, this has  been very limiting for me personally. (more…)