november 2009 - Posts

• RIA Services templates not showing in Visual Studio 2010

  As I am preparing a talk on the new cool ways to build Silverlight applications in VS2010, I installed the Microsoft Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. These tools contain the 'Silverlight Business Application' project template so you can quickly setup a business application in Silverlight with RIA services. After installing the tools (and installing it again...) the project template isn't there.. WTF ?!?! As always I used the 'Google is your friend'-pattern and found the solution: if you have installed previous versions of RIA services (i.e. for Visual Studio 2008) the installer internally crashes and doesn't install the templates. The solution is to remove all previous versions of RIA services and install the SL 4 tools again. You can read more here. Posted nov 30 2009, 11:42 by Ronald with no comments

• PDC09, things are getting better...

  Ok, i'm taking back the lousy goodiebag comment... Microsoft gave all developers a brand new touch laptop today!! The keynote was great this morning, lots of humor and news on how to build and monitor a product (stories from Windows7 productteam). I really like the presentation-style of Steven Sinofsky.. Also the new IE9 was presented. Lots of improvement here, rendering is actualy fast and better quality. On channel 9 are a lot of videos available on all the new stuff. Next was a presentation on Silverlight 4 by Scott Guthrie. Silverlight 3 is already installed on 45% of all internet connected devices worldwide. Silverlight 4 brings webcam support and you can apply WPF effects directly on the moving image. SL4 also has smooth IIS videostreaming. The IIS streaming alsow supports streaming tot the populair iphone. Support for business applications is also provided: printing, clipboard access, dragdrop, commanding, rich text and much more... great ! The SL4 beta is downloadable as of today. One of the best features is that SL can now share common .NET assemblies, so no more recompiling! And you can use binary transport with WCF in SL4 as well.... And if that isn't enough also databinding and code generation has improved big time. Posted nov 18 2009, 11:55 by Ronald with no comments Filed under: PDC Silverlight 4

• New stuff in entity framework 4

  Today I visited a session on entity framework. Lots of cool new stuff in .NET 4.0, finally we get poco objects. And as a matter of fact there is a new feature available as of today in an additional download with even more improvements, like generating your poco objects from the edmx model. The best part is you can change the way code is generated by editing the T4 templates in VS2010. This way it is finally possible to create a testible datalayer without importing all the EF stuff. The EF team also created classes to support offline changing of objects, like you could in the dataset days (remember diffgrams?). This is particulairly good when you send your objects over the wire with WCF. When you send the changed object back, the host can reconnect your entity to the datacontext and apply the correct actions on the datastore. Posted nov 18 2009, 01:44 by Ronald with no comments

• PDC TDD vs BDD

  Currently I am at the birds of a feather session on TDD vs BDD hosted by fellow Dutchmen Dennis Doomen. Nice interactions and great to see how other developers think about the subject and apply it in their teams. Posted nov 18 2009, 01:29 by Ronald with no comments

• PDC09 First comments

  Today the PDC really started.... After partying with Palermo last night we were actually early here today. PDC09 is a little disappointing this year, no breakfast, lousy goodiebag etc. The keynote didn't bring much news. Azure is being highly promoted and will be ready in feb 2010. SQL for Azure is much better and supports t-sql from management studio and supports transactions as well. It is also possible to host your own virtual pc image in Azure.. Cool! Posted nov 17 2009, 07:55 by Ronald with no comments