Brad Abrams - Silverlight 3.0 for Great Business Apps

wow, those links where really cool :O
but what happens when there are multiple SL controls on the page?
or if the SL control is just a small part or the page?
also, can you use clean mvc style urls?  (no extensions and stuff like that)

man, mix is too far away

Well that is something certainly worth looking forward to. I love that fact the the datagrid has continued to be developed and grouping/paging is such an important feature in LOB applications. I hope they follow suit with the WPF grid as well.

I reckon the URL routing is already catered for.

Brad details "deep navigation" in the interview, with forward and back actions in the browser (even copying a clean URL to firefox), so I'm sure this is already taken care of. Brad does mention that this AJAX problem has been dealt with.

Do we have to wait till Mix to find out of the Text Rendering ix fixed (or at least improved)?  Almost everyone I know who is working on a Silverlight project is having a hard time dealing with this issue and most of us have had to come up with horrific hacks to get around it. 

Silverlight 3 is really going to start to drive home the value of using Silverlight for business apps.  It is a clear differentiator from the competition, and a clean win for .net developers, many of whom are currently seeing Silverlight as some sort of media app.  That is set to change.

I have summarised the points from this video here, looking forward to Mix09!

Cheers

Ian
http://silverlightforbusiness.net

its likely that it is, but what i wanna know is how   is it managed server side or does the url get passed into SL and parsed there somehow?
also, what i mean by a "clean" url is a url without file exstensions and querystring arguments

ex:
www.mypage.com/Categories/Mugs
and not
www.mypgae.com/Categories.aspx?name=Mugs

im sure we'll know after mix but mix is tooo faaar awaaaay

I agree with Moemeka... deep linking is great, data grids are fine, lots of good stuff here. But the thing that is really holding me back from using Silverlight for my LOB apps is the fact that the text rendering and font support is really difficult to get it to look good.

I'm willing to be convinced that Silverlight is a fantastic LOB forms framework, but we need better text support. Hopefully we'll see that in the "I can't show you this right now, but just you wait" category.

i dont seem to be making myself very clear..
what im refering to are "restful" Urls
here is a good definition
http://www.xfront.com/REST-Web-Services.html

the example in the demo is not "restful" in this sense as it includes the aspx extesion of the file that the SL application is located in.
 a completly restful url in your example would be:
http://localhost/SLAppTestPage/Views/HomePage 

i dont think thats possible however as that would mean reloading the page, something that we most likely dont want, hence my question in the first place most likely, the closest you could get is http://localhost/SLAppTestPage#/Views/HomePage .
using a html anchor (the # )makes sense for intra site links, what im wondering is just how SL controls are notifed of the anchor link beeing hit and what kind of control you have over the anchor link .. does it need the .xaml extension? is there a routning engine a la mvc in SL to handle the routes?
what happens for instance if you have two SL controls on the page? i suppose you can only have one anchor link? (or can you? there could be some syntax for adressing diffrent controls)

lots anf lots of questions.. again, im sure things will clear at mix

Brad did a great job about justifying all these new features for SL3 and how they will save developers so much time building LoB apps with the new framework. I'd personally use this video and the one from his MIX session to show new developers and people who don't believe in SL.

The team is doing a great job on the new LoB framework.
Thanks Brad!

..Ben

For a business app you really need to also think about printing support.

On the silverlight forums there is a thread with over 50 posts dating back to when it was called Silverlight 1.1 saying that printing support is needed.

I hope that printing support is one of the surprises of Mix but I don't think it will be as it has been rumoured that they are not looking to do that for the 3.0 release.

+1 on the font rendering issues.

Heh. I started that thread. I left the "alert me when someone posts" feature on and still get a few "me too"s a month in my inbox.

Silverlight 3.0 is really nice, I love the user input validation. hey check out my silverlight 2.0 application at www.somaliplay.com and tell me what you think.

Yep, you can definitely make your URLs cleaner, to remove file extensions, query strings, etc.  You'll find it to be very similar to ASP.NET MVC in general concept (and even a bit in syntax), so hopefully the learning curve is smooth.

But, one thing to note is that they'll never be quite as good as pure server-side URLs because Silverlight (like Flash, AJAX, etc.) can only update the part of the URL after the hash ("#"), so you'll get http://some/server/url#some/client/url - careful thinking can still lead to something very nice, you're just stuck with the "#" in the middle somewhere.

Hi aL_ -- I think we must recognize that REST is a style, not a mandate.  In the definition of REST as described by Fielding makes no such requirement that file extensions be hidden, but rather that the URI represent a state of an interface.  The above still does wheter .aspx and # are present.  The guidance for RESTful URIs is that a noun is used versus a verb so /SLTestAppPage/getView?view=HomePage would be lest noun-ish, but still represents and endpoint to a resource.

It's a semantic difference between a REST purist (hi-REST) and an interpretation I suppose . 

But enough on that...viva Silverlight!

Funny you should ask  if their is a routning engine a la mvc in SL to handle the routes? That is the almost exactly the title of my blog post today.. I introduce a rounting and navigation framework based on the same api as mvc in silverlight.. check it out at http://www.orkpad.com/Blog/post/2009/03/10/Silverlight-Routing-a-la-MVC-Routing.aspx (.) In my internal usage, it is awesome way to design applications because you can extend and change without have to bring down the whole house. Cheers

im sorry if i struck a nerve or something i didnt mean for my post to spark a discussion about "beauty" of urls, what is rest/hi-rest/lo-rest and what isnt (i still barely know after years of RoR development) and what approach is the "best"

i was just interested in the amount of control you have over
a) the url to the page the SL control is on (i.e. does SL3 pose restrictions on that url in order to have deep links?  -the awnser to this appears to be a "no")
b) the SL part of the url (the right side of the #)

as for part b, ive got some awnsers already (thank you orktane, i'll deffinetly check that out thats for SL2 though right?) and i'm sure there are lots of details that will be revealed at mix

@AL, yeah it's for SL 2.. and it seems quite similar to what is being show for SL3. However, let's see how extensible the navigation system is in SL, because the MVC type routing engine that I have is quite quite powerful and extensible. Let's see..

One unanswered SL 3.0 question, one that, to me, is critical for line of business apps, is support for a lower level drawing object/API (e.g. DrawingVisual in WPF).  Even marginally complex business charts with more than a few hundred data points exhibit poor performance due to the need to instantiate so many shape objects (lines, rectangles, etc.).  Any plans to add these capabilities in SL 3.0?

Silverlight 2 gave us severe multimedia, Silverlight 3 is finally going to give us a great framework for building business applications.  Great video!

...Matt
http://www.insidercoding.com

Like Rick, I too would really appreciate to be able to draw directly to the canvas instead of having to create drawing objects.  It's alot of dev work to maintain those objects for graphic editing applications.

...Matt
http://www.insidercoding.com