Brad Abrams - Silverlight 3.0 for Great Business Apps

Posted By: Robert Hess | Mar 9th @ 9:12 AM | 49,583 Views | 22 Comments

Even business applications deserve to look nice. In this episode Brad Abrams shares with us some of the details he will be covering in his upcoming MIX09 session on Silverlight 3.0. While there are some "unannounced" aspects of Silverlight 3.0 that he can't go into for us in this show, he does provide us with a couple of great demos that illustrate how easy it will be to write great looking applications with Silverlight 3.0. To see all of the great features of Silverlight 3.0, you'll want to check out his session at MIX09:

Building Business Centric Applications with Silverlight 3
Come learn what it what it takes to building a data-intensive Silverlight application with the new set of features coming in Silverlight 3.  You will learn how to write secure scalable N-tier applications in a way that as simple was writing 2-teir applications.  Explore how improvements and futures in Silverlight are helping to enable rapid development for business applications and make your development process more productive

But I'll also try to bring Brad back after MIX09 for a quick recap and summary of the cool features he showed off.
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#Mar 9th @ 11:02 AM
aL_
aL_
Rx ftw

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 Tongue Out

#Mar 9th @ 11:38 AM
vesuvius
vesuvius
Das Glasperlenspiel
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.




#Mar 9th @ 11:45 AM
vesuvius
vesuvius
Das Glasperlenspiel

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.

#Mar 9th @ 12:21 PM
Moemeka
Moemeka
Me

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. 

#Mar 9th @ 12:33 PM
IanBlackburn
IanBlackburn
mmmm coffee...

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

#Mar 9th @ 12:35 PM
aL_
aL_
Rx ftw

its likely that it is, but what i wanna know is how  Wink 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 Smiley

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 Wink

#Mar 9th @ 12:51 PM
Robert Hess
Robert Hess
Changing the world, one cocktail at a time.
aL, I suppose "clean" might be in the eye of the beholder? I realize that the URL listed in the address bar can be a little hard to read in this video, but essentially it looks like this:

http://localhost/SLAppTestPage.aspx#/Views/HomePage.xaml

The Silverlight application itself exists on the ASPX page shown in the URL, so that essentially has to be listed in that fashion, however just as you'd use "#" to then link to a "position" within a big gigantic page, we are using this to link to a the "position" within the Silverlight application that you are wanting to access.
#Mar 9th @ 1:36 PM
matthiasS
matthiasS
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.
#Mar 9th @ 2:43 PM
aL_
aL_
Rx ftw

i dont seem to be making myself very clear.. Smiley
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 Smiley 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.. Smiley again, im sure things will clear at mix Smiley

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