On Monday I had the opportunity to present the MIX 2010 Day 1 Keynote in Las Vegas (you can watch a video of it here ).  In the keynote I announced the release of the Silverlight 4 Release Candidate (we’ll ship the final release of it next month) and the VS 2010 RC tools for Silverlight 4.  I also had the chance to talk for the first time about how Silverlight and XNA can now be used to build Windows Phone 7 applications. During my talk I did two quick Windows Phone 7 coding demos using Silverlight – a quick “Hello World” application and a “Twitter” data-snacking application.  Both applications were easy to build and only took a few minutes to create on stage.  Below are the steps you can follow yourself to build them on...

Last week, I blogged about a nice way of auto-running T4MVC by using the Macro IDE to write an OnBuildBegin event handler .  This was a big improvement over the hacky ‘AlwaysKeepTemplateDirty’ flag that we’ve been using since T4MVC’s early days. Since then, Wayne Brantley has taken this idea to the next level by turning it into a Visual Studio AddIn.  Check out his post and give it a try! The nice benefits of the AddIn over directly handling VS events in the macro IDE are: Simpler install : you drop a couple files in the AddIn folder and it just works Encapsulation : all the code related to this is in one binary Easy to disable : once the AddIn is installed, you can just go in Tools / AddIn Manager to turn it on or off Note that Wayne...

I had a great time today in my Mix2010 session on SEO for Silverlight .   You can find all the slides (more than I was able to cover in the talk) here .  and the the full play-by-play of the demo (include a link to the completed solution).    I started off talking why SEO matters Then I talked about three tips   You can view the site live by using Bing for “my foodie Explorer Cooking Class with Joe..” or the other guys search engine equally well .  ;-)   Enjoy! Read More...

To continue our series , let’s look at SEO and Silverlight.  The vast majority of web traffic is driven by search. Search engines are the first stop for many users on the public internet and is increasingly so in corporate environments as well.  Search is also the key technology that drives most ad revenue.  So needless to say, SEO is important.  But how does SEO work in a Silverlight application where most of the interesting content is dynamically generated?   I will present an application pattern for doing SEO in a Silverlight with the minimum of extra work.  There are three fun-and-easy steps to making your Silverlight application SEO friendly.   Step 1: Make important content deep linkable Step...

MIX is happening and there is a lot of excitement around the various releases such as the Windows Phone 7 Developer Preview, IE9 Platform Preview and few other announcements that have been made. Clearly, the Windows Phone 7 Developer Preview has generated the maximum interest and opened a plethora of opportunities for .NET Developers. It also takes the mobile development to a new generation and doesn’t force developers to learn different programming language. Along with this, few other releases have been out. The most anticipated Silverlight 4 RC is out and its corresponding templates are also out there for you to download. Once VS 2010 RC was released, it was much of a disappointment that it doesn’t support SL4 development as well as the SL4...

To continue our series , let’s look at updating the data.  I have created a Plates.xaml page with very similar structure to the above.    For details on how I created this page, check out my PDC 09 demo walk through.     Now let’s look at updating the Plate data.. First we will create some default “form” UI by dragging an entity from the datasources window in much the same way we did above.  But before we create the UI, notice the order of the fields – it matches the order they will be generated in the UI. They are in alphabetic order, but that is not always what you want.  For example, I think Name should be first. To address this, in the server project, open the DishViewService.metadata.cs file and add...

  Today at Mix10 we announced our increased support and involvement in the jQuery Library and how we are working closely with the community and the jQuery Team to accelerate the development of this already powerful front-end library. In recent weeks leading up to Mix we have been working with John Resig and the rest of the team on a proposal, specification and prototype of a new jQuery templating engine, designed to make it easier than ever before to create rich, data-driven web applications.  What we showed in the keynote today represented an early prototype of the jQuery Templating engine based off the community-driven specification.  Right now the feature is available as a jQuery plugin but we hope to include it in the core...

OData is an emerging set of extensions for the ATOM protocol that makes it easier to share data over the web. To show off OData in RIA Services, let’s continue our series .       We think it is very interesting to expose OData from a DomainService to facilitate data sharing.   For example I might want users to be able to access my data in a rich way in Excel as well as my custom Silverlight client.   I’d like to be able to enable that without writing multiple services or duplicating any business or data access logic.  This is very easy to enable with RIA Services.  In fact it is just a check box away!    When you create your DomainService simply check the “Expose OData...

About two months ago, John Resig and I met at Café Algiers in Harvard square to discuss how Microsoft can contribute to the jQuery project. Today, Scott Guthrie announced in his second-day MIX keynote that Microsoft is throwing its weight behind jQuery and making it the primary way to develop client-side Ajax applications using Microsoft technologies. What does this announcement mean? It means that Microsoft is shifting its resources to invest in jQuery. Developers on the ASP.NET team are now working full-time to contribute features to the core jQuery library. Furthermore, we are working with other teams at Microsoft to ensure that our technologies work great with jQuery. We are contributing to the open-source jQuery project in the exact same...

My cell phone contract expires in a couple weeks and I was all set to buy an iPhone. The iPhone had started to take off when I got my current phone / contract but at that the time Microsoft paid for a significant portion of my phone bill so staying with a Windows powered phone was appropriate (I like to be a good team player.)  Budget tightening as changed the expense policy and now Microsoft’s contribution to my cell phone expenses is limited to $35. So, I figured I’d get an iPhone, it’s what all the cool geeks have.  Plus, my Windows phone from T-Mobile is falling apart, which matters little since it’s never really worded all that well any way. Windows Mobile 6 wasn’t a real home run in comparison. There have been a number of reasons...