From the Editor

Volume 12, Number 21: October 6, 2008
 

A lot more of you need to be going to your local evangelism events. Just think - you can watch fully functional programs built before your very eyes. I recently spoke in Fresno and Berkeley, and there was a great deal of interest in all the major pillars in the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. They loved the graphic capabilities of WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) and Silverlight. Silverlight is like a lightweight version of WPF; you can create incredibly rich user interfaces, complete with multimedia, vector graphics, animation, and a powerful set of user interface construction tools.

I created a really elegant WPF application that made use of the ADO.NET Entity Framework and ASP.NET Data Services. Using this combination of technologies is so powerful because of the way the Entity Framework allows you to abstract away the gory details of a relational database. The Entity Framework leverages Entity SQL, which allows you to write really clean SQL statements that don't have dozens of join clauses. The bottom line is that you are programming at the conceptual level, not the physical database level, which produces beautiful, readable code.

The real bonus comes into play when that data is exposed across HTTP with ASP.NET Data Services. That allows any client application, Web-based or thick-client, to transparently send and receive domain-specific data over HTTP without the need for additional messaging layers or session tracking. Simply put, this technology is scalable and efficient.

By the end of this demo, we had a graphically rich, thick client, WPF application that used high level entity objects - and the data that fed this application was nicely tucked away on a Web server. The data is provided via "REST." You can find a good explanation in an article called, "How I Explained REST to My Wife."

If you'd like to see all this, come check it out as part of my October MSDN Events Unleashed series in Northern California.

If you are really interested in REST (or want to know what all the hype is about), my good buddy, Rob Bagby has built 10 blog posts and 6 screencasts on these subjects.

Finally, learn about the future of Microsoft's technology. The place is the Professional Developers Conference, October 27 - 30 in Los Angeles. It's about software + services, cloud computing, and Windows 7. If you plan to be at PDC, shoot me an e-mail. It would be great to grab a cup of coffee with some of you.

Thanks for reading,
Bruno

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