From the Editor
August 25, 2008
The good news is that just today I upgraded to Visual Studio SP1, and
eliminated all that beta stuff. Although it took a bit of time, it went smoothly
– as long as I didn’t have Office apps running or IE. But the great news is that
it went flawlessly, despite the fact that I had all kinds of .NET beta software
installed, including Silverlight, and VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 Beta 2.
Thankfully, there is the “Visual Studio 2008 Patch Removal Tool,” which cleans
things up before the REAL install. This saved huge time for me because I did not
need to specifically uninstall any software. I just ran 2 setups (one for the
patch and one for SP1). However, Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 2 for Visual
Studio 2008 does need to be re-installed. I expected that – it is beta software.
I’ve really enjoyed playing with Silverlight. Scott Guthrie’s excellent blog
about building WPF and Silverlight inspired me to do a video series on this topic.
I also enjoyed Rob Bagby’s materials on these topics as well.
My videos aren’t up on my site yet, but they will be soon. [They are up now.]
You can learn about controls, layout management, networking, data-binding, styles,
user controls, and templates. There will be a section for the ADO.NET Entity
Framework and how to use LINQ to get to relational data. This relational data
is then exposed via REST from within a WCF service. The amazing thing to me is
that the complex user interface that I built with WPF was ported to Silverlight
in just a few minutes. I was able to leverage my entire thick client WPF code and
run it seamlessly in a browser, even browsers on the Macintosh. I just copy and
pasted some XAML and some code behind to my Silverlight project. Recompile. Run.
Silverlight will inspire some interesting architectures – both on the client and
on the server. Silverlight will easily devour data and we’ll see some interesting
applications emerging. Greater demands will be placed on the backend servers and
companies will really need to load test their applications. Companies will need to
develop scalable architectures with WCF.
So where’s the best place to learn? How about at a seminar put on by International
Association of Software Architects happening in San Francisco on October 6-8th? It is
a great time of year to be in San Francisco.
Architect & IASA Connections (10/6-10/8)
Don’t miss this unique event for IT & Software Architects that will impact how you think,
design & innovate – and help guide you as a professional architect. The conference offers
over 70 in-depth sessions from industry experts including lots of great architecture advice
for your WCF, Workflow and WPF applications. The first 100 attendees will receive Visual S
tudio 2008 Professional & IASA Membership. Visit www.IASAConnections.com
or call 800-438-6720.
Also, keep in mind that I will be hosting the upcoming MSDN Event - Visual Studio 2008,
WPF and Vista Security. The schedule currently has me in Fresno on 9/16, Berkeley on 9/18,
and San Francisco on 10/7. I will cover WCF, WPF, Silverlight, REST, Vista Security, and
much more! ). All event information will be listed on MSDNEvents.com.
If you have any questions or topics you want me to write about, please
email me.
Thanks for reading,
Bruno
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