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

	Title Of Each Article	Video Included With Each Post
Part 1	Introduction To RIA Services In Silverlight (This Article)	7 Minutes
Part 2	Basic RIA Services And DataGrid With  VS 2010 Tooling	14 Minutes
Part 3	Adding A DataGrid With Connect The Dots DataBinding in VS 2010	13 Minutes
Part 4	Adding a Navigation Page to a Silverlight Business Application Template	11 Minutes
Part 5	Adding Speakers Page Template With Converters In Visual Studio 2010 Beta2	11 Minutes
Part 6	Adding A Sessions Page That Includes a Query Parameter In Silverlight VS2010 Beta2	10 Minutes
Part 7	Basic Authentication and Authorization In RIA Services	5 Minutes

I’ve heavily borrowed from Brad Abrams PDC09 presentation here and am very thankful for the help.  I’m personally very excited about the opportunities RIA Services gives us as developers to efficiently build powerful multi tier applications without compromise.

I’d recommend going to Brad Abrams PDC09 presentation mentioned above to get a better understanding of what Microsoft was thinking and its plans for RIA Services. The way I see it is RIA Services is built on the WCF Stack.  It basically is a technology that let’s the developer create both client and server code at the same time.  It essentially removes the middle layer form a development perspective, but keeps it there in a very physical way using all the power of WCF.  For example, you create you logic on the server side and that code automatically gets migrated to the client for simplicity of calling.

For those interested where the motivation came from to to this, it’s an interesting story.  Last week, Mathias Brandewinder, the organizer of our local Bay.Net San Francisco user group emailed and asked if I could fill in last minute for the upcoming (actually today’s) bay.net meeting and, could I talk about RIA Services.  Well, 2 years or so ago, I did a quite extensive Silverlight 1.1 project for Leverage Software using the first beta of the .CLR release of Silverlight (C#).  I have to say, it was an awful experience.  So, now at Silverlight 4.0, RIA Services, I’m back and very excited.

By way of people that have helped me in the last week to get this far, just to name a few:  Bruno Terkaly, offering to do whatever he could and giving me tech tips, Michael Scherotter in “going to town” as he says to make the Speaker’s page look really nice in a live meeting, Victor Gaudioso in taking time on his busy weekend to call me  and offer help, Brad Abrams putting up with my list of naive questions and patiently responding, a slew of ASPInsiders who pointed me at an excellent place to host the videos, and David Kelly for giving me a nicely styled Silverlight player to show the videos on this blog.

I’m sitting in the mall below the Microsoft Office in San Francisco where the presentation will be in about 2 hours.  Hopefully, I’ll finish all seven articles and get them posted to the internet very soon.  I did the videos as just practice for my presentation.  They are not polished or edited.  I’m taking the chance of posting them in the hopes that they help someone struggling with all the new features like I have been during the last week.

Finally, this demo is built on live Silicon Valley Code Camp Data that has been collected over the past 4 years.  I can’t really publish that database along with the completed solution before I clean and randomize the attendee data.  Meanwhile, I will post the project code but it will not work until I’ve had a chance to clean up the database.  My thinking is that it’s all positive and better to release the code now rather than wait until I have the database cleaned up.

Below is what the end result of what we are building will look like (if you make it through all the articles and videos).

Attached here is source that you can build with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and it will work with No Database.  The Domain Class is heavily modified from what is presented, but it will allow you to actually run and play with real data.

http://www.meetup.com/The-San-Francisco-ExtJS-Meetup-Group/calendar/10302891/

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa478947.aspx

My plan is to do a progression where I start with a trivial GridPanel, then work myself in 5 steps to a full working membership editor that looks like this:

If you want to to run the code I will be explaining tonight, here are some links:

http://aspnetextjsdemo.peterkellner.net/ExtJSProfileEditorASimpleGrid.html

http://aspnetextjsdemo.peterkellner.net/ExtJSProfileEditorBMoreGrid.html

http://aspnetextjsdemo.peterkellner.net/ExtJSProfileEditorCMoreGridWithPaging.html

http://aspnetextjsdemo.peterkellner.net/ExtJSProfileEditorDMoreGridEditing.html

http://aspnetextjsdemo.peterkellner.net/ExtJSProfileEditorEAddDeleteToolbar.html

If you want a more complete demonstration of ExtJS in general along with more details of the code, I’m presenting a full length version of this at he Bay.Net Meeting in Microsoft next Wednesday evening.  Here are the full details.  These events are both community events are free.

http://www.baynetug.org/DesktopModules/DetailXEvents.aspx?ItemID=378&mid=49

Hope to see you at one of the events!

Here are the descriptions:

VM1

Build Blazingly Fast ASP.NET Apps with 100% Clientside UI ExtJS

Peter Kellner

Intermediate

Need a web application that has the responsiveness and interactivity of a forms app but still looks and feels like a web? One of the best kept secrets (at least to the Microsoft community) is ExtJS. It’s a different paradigm then we are all use to, but the results are spectacular. Take a look at this url and you will see as well as learn how to do this yourself. The hardest part is shuttling the data back and forth. A lot of this session will be talking about how to do a real world app that does this. Once you go this way, you’ll be gone from serverside forms for almost ever.

VM10

Building High Performance ASP.NET Web Applications

Peter Kellner

Intermediate

Topics will include appropriate use of Cache and Session State, as well as how and when to use them. Viewstate management and methods to minimize its use will be discussed. Code to pop up a warning when a threshold is met in development will be shown. When and how to take advantage of Server Farms will be discussed, as well as trouble shooting techniques to find problems. The evils of Server Affinity, as well as a common pattern for caching database queries will be shown to be wrong. Time permitting, we will talk about using Microsoft’s Ajax.asp.net with UpdatePanel and webservices and how these affect performance and scalability.

Portland Code Camp – May 30, 2009 at Reed College

Building asp.net Membership with ExtJS (Super Rich JavaScript Library)

JavaScript | extjs | ASP.NET

In this session, we will demonstrate building a super rich JavaScript interface to the standard ASP.NET Membership and Profile services. That is, built into ASP.NET are wonderful providers that allow you to validate and store user credentials typically to a database. It also lets you store other information such as pictures, first and last names, as well as anything else you may want to store. In this session we will build a highly performing, 100% JavaScript UI to maintain hundreds of thousands of users. As part of this solution, techniques for using REST based services to access this information will be presented. Once you see this, it will be hard to ever use web forms again.