Silverlight and Data

re: Silverlight and Data

jesseliberty — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 18:25:36 GMT

You'll be marching through the streets with Tim on your shoulders and I'll be a footnote :-)

That said, I will try to fill in the corners will videos, tutorials and blog entries, but he is the guy who has been charged with building the LOB end-to-end demo and I know he'll do a great job (I'm deeply jealous).

Keep an eye out for his "corner"

re: Silverlight and Data

jasonbsteele — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 14:24:13 GMT

This is great news! I too would like to see a LOB application and I agree with shaggygi: an approach to how to deal with firing of multiple async queries would be much appreciated.

I would also like to see the best way to implement business logic when your EF is exposed through a Data Service.

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re: Silverlight and Data

Psychlist1972 — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 02:29:57 GMT

I find this discussion interesting.

When I look at a new technology, I really only want to focus on what is new or different in what I need to do to support that specific technology. I have never used a reference app as a guide: they get too muddy, tend to show someone else's idea of a "good" architecture, and generally are too big to absorb reasonably.

For me, the worst demos are the ones that spend too much time talking about something outside the specific technology we're trying to learn.

I might not be the audience for this, but felt I had to chime in :)

Pete

re: Silverlight and Data

anmotayo — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 20:06:56 GMT

I agree with Ken Cox.

I have studied the tutorials/videos on www.silverlight.net and I understand the big picture as regards LINQ to SQL, WCF and Silverlight but I would love to see a practical CRUD tutorial.

Lets see something that uses LINQ/WCF or Astoria. That way we can compare both approaches.

re: Silverlight and Data

BenHayat — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 19:24:19 GMT

>>Aggravating the problem is the fact that many of us are venturing into WCF for the first time while we ramp up with Silverlight projects. That means we confront a lack of knowledge about Silverlight databinding AND the peculiarities of binding to WCF services that we don't fully master.<<

Ken, well said! I'm hoping as time goes on, MSFT will provide a more official "Pattern & Practices" for developing LOB application. As another poster pointed out, there is so much involved that just reading and writing data isn't everything. Plus, having too many new technologies trying to make them work together without any guidelines (WCF, LINQ, Astoria, EF,SL, Async and etc.)is just too overwhelming. So, I'm not sure what Jesse can do to address most of these issues. I think this subject is much deeper and more vast to tackle via a blog post. Again, I hope to see more official solutions from MSFT to address the overall LOB ecosystem!

..Ben

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re: Silverlight and Data

Ken Cox [MVP] — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 16:09:50 GMT

The end-to-end sample is the only way to go.

Hundreds of us are scouring the Internet for a realistic (but manageable and not over-engineered) sample of manipulating data (CRUD operations) in a Silverlight 2 application. There are promising pieces of the puzzle scattered all over the place. Unfortunately, after investing time in a sample, we discover it lacks a key element - like actually saving changed data back to the database.

Aggravating the problem is the fact that many of us are venturing into WCF for the first time while we ramp up with Silverlight projects. That means we confront a lack of knowledge about Silverlight databinding AND the peculiarities of binding to WCF services that we don't fully master.

Ken

re: Silverlight and Data

rhaug — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 13:12:10 GMT

I definitely would like an end-to-end example for a LOB application. Something like Northwind application or similar would be great.

As a starter it would be good to just show how to be use either WCF or ADO.NET Data Services for this.

Longer term it would be great to have a full-blown application using Prism, Silverlight, ADO.Data Services/WCF with best practices (separation of concerns, security, unit-testing, etc.) showing a LOB application.

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re: Silverlight and Data

rachidadukes@live.com — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 02:20:04 GMT

I agree with your decision, I'm always looking for silverlight Line-Of-Business Applications. I found a good sample: www.silverlightshow.net/.../Building-a-Framework-for-Silverlight-Line-Of-Business-Applications.aspx

This article provides an example of a LOB application based upon the AdventureWorks company often used in Microsoft sample applications, and uses the Microsoft SQL Server demonstration database as provided by Microsoft.

The problem with this sample, it doesn't have enough details to understand it.

I would like to see you combine it all into one application giving us some guidance on what MS believe are good practice.

Thanks

re: Silverlight and Data

shaggygi — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 02:14:46 GMT

I would like to see the following in a SL2 data application.

1. Daisy-chaining the async data queries from a database using WCF service. Let's say you can only call and retrieve 25 records due to process speed and size of data recovered. You have a total of a 100 records so you would need to call async Method 4 times. How do you retrieve all records and combine them?

2. Self-Hosted Services. Include and describe the service you need to create to get the crosspolicyaccess.xml file.

re: Silverlight and Data

Dimebrain — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 00:48:24 GMT

I agree with your assessment that it's hard to prescribe a way to build Silverlight applications that use data without blurring the boundaries between Silverlight and the supporting technologies behind it. For what it's worth I have a 7-part blog series that covers each tier from LINQ to SQL for the data layer, WCF for the service layer, and Silverlight consuming the data, making changes, and updating.

You can find that here: www.dimebrain.com/.../linq-wcf-silver.html.

I didn't cover data-binding on the client itself, but that should be the final piece in this puzzle. Paul Stovell's Bindable LINQ opens up some interesting possibilities in this area.

re: Silverlight and Data

sariel — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 23:57:22 GMT

Maybe take a look at what Rob Conery is doing with asp.net mvc. He is taking a full app from start to finish. Personally I would like to see some type of LOB application done this way in Silverlight. I think we all really hate data demos since the days of the VB 4 data control where someone as MS did a demo by dragging a DAO data control onto a form binding it and bang there it is. We all, at the time went oh ah. But now we say what about validation, concurrency, error handling, displaying and handling data differently to how it is stored in the database, security, globalization and in the case of silverlight with async data retrieval what about the eye candy that needs to display to the user for each request and handling errors when the request times out or the connection goes down. I guess I would like to see you guys combine it all into one app therefore giving us some guidance on what you believe and possibly MS believe are good practise.

At the moment sure we can piece allot of what you guys have done together, but I think some examples are still the old vb 4 data control. Maybe if you do a demo that takes data from an astoria service then you could do part 1, quick and dirty never run in production, part 2 with validation, concurrency, error handling and eye candy waits as well. While these might not be silverlight specific things I think because of the Async nature of silverlight we arent seeing these demos elsewhere.