I have heard many customers ask about building business applications on Silverlight... the union of a great .NET programming model web-style deployment\update and rich user experience makes Silverlight an attractive option.  Rockford Lhotka recently released an update of his very popular business application framework CLSA.NET for Silverlight 2!  You can read the over view here:  Overview of CSLA .NET 3.6 for Windows and Silverlight  While we are at it, the Patterns and Practices folks are also working on Prism for Silverlight... another great resource for you!   Enjoy! ... (more)

Silverlight in SharePoint 2010

SharePoint Archiving Journal One misconception I have heard is that SharePoint 2010 is completely based on Silverlight.  While SharePoint does use Silverlight now in various places, I would say most of it is still based upon regular ASP.NET pages.  I haven’t seen anything that actually requires Silverlight yet, but it does make things prettier when you have it.  This is just a brief overview of some things you might see.  For example, one of my favorite new things is the Create page.  If you don’t have Silverlight installed, you get something that looks like this. As you can see it looks a lot like the traditional Create page in previous versions of SharePoint.  However, one thing you might notice that’s new on this page is the Improve the Creation Experience - Install Microsoft Silverlight link.  It gives you a link to install it and the next time you go to the ... (more)

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services: Exposing Data from Entity Framework

To continue our series I wanted to look next at how to expose your data from the server side of your application. The interesting data in your business applications come from a wide variety of data sources.  From a SQL Database, from Oracle DB, from Sql Azure, from Sharepoint, from a mainframe and you have likely already chosen a datamodel such as NHibernate, Linq2Sql, Entity Framework, Stored Proc, a service.   The goal of RIA Service in this release is to make it easy to work with data from any (or many) of the sources in a seamless way from a Silverlight application.  This walk through will use Entity Framework accessing the Sql Express database, but the basic concept applies to any data source. Add DishView.mdf to BusinessApplication1.Web\App_Data – Of course in a real world example, you’d just have a connection string to an existing database. Then create an Enti... (more)

Wildcard Subdomains in Windows Azure

I was meeting with a small company today that has developed a SaaS solution around task and project management. It's a very cool application, and as is the fashion these days, uses subdomains to determine the end user's company as requests come to the browser. So, if I were to sign up for the application, my home url would be http://adamhoffman.getdonedone.com, whereas if you signed up (and had the unlikely name of Bill Ion), your home page would be http://billion.getdonedone.com. This is handled in ASP.NET application code on their Win2K8 servers hosted at Rackspace. The question quickly became "hey, we can do something similar in Azure, right?" The answer is yes, and no, and yes. Let me explain. My instant assumption was "yes", and ultimately, it is true that you can accomplish this behavior. It does, however, require that wherever you host your DNS that points to... (more)

Some details of my book on SQL Server Reporting Services 2012

This book is totally hands-on, you learn by doing it all by yourselves in record time. Install SQL Server 2012, SharePoint Server 2010, and configure Reporting Services both native and SharePoint Integrated on Windows 7 Install SSDT and author reports, both local and remote, and deploy them to report servers Develop desktop and web applications by using Report Viewer controls Author different kinds of reports with the latest gadgets by working with Report Builder Manage access to the report server, report scheduling, report delivery, report uploads, and downloads with Report Manager Create Tabular Models with SQL Server Analysis Services and deploy them to SSAS Server using SSDT Author Power View Reports from your SharePoint Site and export them as Power Point files Get a first hand experience with Power View Reports, get the full breadth and width of features  Don'... (more)

Where Are RIA Technologies Headed in 2008?

I am always being told off by i-technologists for quoting Picasso as having said that computers are useless. But I still love his reasoning? "Because they can only give you answers." Picasso, like AJAXWorld Magazine, liked questions. So we thought we would share with you what some of the world's leading rich Internet application pioneers are thinking may be the next questions that we need to see answered. From that readers can themselves infer where AJAX is headed. What are the top questions to ask next about AJAX? Eric Miraglia of Yahoo! 1.  (From March'08) How do I calculate the ROI of building my RIA on the iPhone SDK vs using AJAX? 2.  How do I assess the performance of my app and decide what to do next to make it faster?  3.  When it comes to accessibility, how do I know what's required of me for my rich web apps?  Beyond what's required, what makes good business se... (more)

Cloud Expo 2011 East To Attract 10,000 Delegates and 200 Exhibitors

SYS-CON Events announced today that the 8th International Cloud Expo will take place June 6-9, 2011, in New York City. The International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo series is the world's leading Cloud-focused event and is held three times a year, in New York, Silicon Valley and in Europe. Over 600 corporate sponsors and 10,000 industry professionals have participated in Cloud Computing Expo since its inception, more than all other Cloud-related events put together. Cloud Computing Expo 2011 East Call for Papers Deadline November 30, 2010 - SUBMIT YOUR SPEAKING PROPOSAL TODAY! The four-day event will offer a rich array of sessions led by exceptional speakers about the business and technical value of cloud computing with more than 150 sponsors and exhibitors and over 5,000 estimated delegates from well over 48 different countries. Explore Cloud Expo Sponsorship &... (more)

Cloud Expo, Inc. Announces Cloud Expo 2011 New York Venue

Click Here to Save $800 at Cloud Expo New York ! Cloud Expo, Inc. announced on Thursday that Cloud Expo 2011 New York, the 8th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, will take place June 6-9, 2011, at the Javits Center in New York City. Cloud Expo - International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo series is the world’s leading Cloud-focused event and is held in New York, Silicon Valley, Prague, Tokyo, and Hong-Kong. Over 900 corporate sponsors and more than 65,000 industry professionals have participated in Cloud Expo since its inception, tenfold more than all other Cloud-related events put together. Click Here to Save $800 at Cloud Expo New York ! "Cloud Expo was announced on February 24, 2007, the day the term ‘cloud computing' was coined," said Fuat Kircaali, Chairman and Founder of Cloud Expo, Inc. "Cloud has become synonymous with ‘computing' and ‘soft... (more)

The Next Chapter in the Virtualization Story Begins

Cloud Expo Europe €550 Savings here! Cloud Expo West $800 Savings here! Cloud Computing Journal recently caught up with Pete Malcolm, CEO of cloud management innovators Abiquo - a major new player in the fast-emerging Cloud ecosystem and Platinum Plus Sponsor of 6th Cloud Expo being held in Prague, the Czech Republic, 21-22 June 2010. Malcolm is keynoting at the event. His theme will be "An Open Cloud Ecosystem - the Gathering Storm." Explore Cloud Expo Sponsorship & Exhibit Opportunities ! Abiquo was also Platinum Plus Sponsor of the 5th International Cloud Expo held April 19-21, 2010 at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City Cloud Computing Journal: How would you define the difference between Private clouds and Public Clouds, and why is the distinction so important in the context of Cloud Computing? Pete Malcolm: Actually, I think people get rather too hun... (more)

Accessing the ASP.NET Authentication, Profile and Role Service in Silverlight

In ASP.NET 2.0, we introduced a very powerful set of application services in ASP.NET (Membership, Roles and profile).  In 3.5 we created a client library for accessing them from Ajax and .NET Clients and exposed them via WCF web services.    For more information on the base level ASP.NET appservices that this walk through is based on, please see Stefan Schackow's excellent book Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Security, Membership, and Role Management. In this tutorial I will walk you through how to access the WCF application services from a directly from the Silverlight client.  This works super well if you have a site that is already using the ASP.NET application services and you just need to access them from a Silverlight client.   (Special thanks to Helen for a good chunk of this implantation) Here is what I plan to show: 1. Login\Logout 2. Save personalization settings ... (more)

AJAX and RIA Market Is Heating Up: Sun CEO

"The economy might be cooling down, but the RIA market is definitely heating up," declared Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz recently in his widely-read industry blog. Schwartz was writing as Sun shipped its 100,000,000th JavaFX runtime - a download rate that makes it the fastest growing RIA platform on the market and demonstrating the fastest adoption of any product Sun has ever shipped. "What you can do with Flash is comparable to Silverlight, and again comparable to JavaFX," Schwartz noted, adding: "That said, must you use JavaFX or Flash or Silverlight to be a part of the rich internet future? Well, no - Apple used Objective-C for the iPhone, after all, completely discrediting the purist notion that if the app isn't written with a web scripting language, it isn't fashion forward." Schwartz underlined the happy fact that the 100,000,000 milestone was reached just in tim... (more)