DevConnections Orlando Talks on Silverlight and LINQ/Entity Framework

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I had a great time speaking at DevConnections in Orlando this year.  A lot of fun people were there and I had the opportunity to talk with several of them about some of the applications they were building. 

As promised, here’s the code and slides for my talks.

This talk was geared toward helping people get started building Silverlight applications.  I walked through building an application from scratch in this session so there really aren’t any slides.  However, a sample application that relies upon several different Silverlight and data access technologies is included.  It covers topics such as layout controls, input controls, WCF integration, Entity Framework, animations, styles and more.  I had a great turnout (especially given that it started at 8 AM) so thanks to everyone who attended. 

This talk discussed best practices for building and architecting ASP.NET applications.  The talk focused on N-Layer applications (presentation, business, data and model layers) but also showed how LINQ to SQL or Entity Framework could be thrown into the mix.  This is always a great talk to give since I always have a people come up afterwards who are excited that they can go back to work and make their applications more re-useable and testable.

Animations are a lot of fun in Silverlight so this is one of my favorite talks to give.  I covered the fundamentals of creating animations from scratch in Visual Studio as well as how animations can be created in Expression Blend 2.  The Visual State Manager was also discussed and I walked through an example of using it to modify state behavior for controls.

 

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For more information about onsite, online and video training, mentoring and consulting solutions for .NET, SharePoint or Silverlight please visit http://www.TheWahlinGroup.com.

Published Thursday, March 26, 2009 8:33 AM by dwahlin
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Comments

# re: DevConnections Orlando Talks on Silverlight and LINQ/Entity Framework

Wednesday, March 25, 2009 10:40 AM by sam

hey dan, I didn't get to ask you this question at the conference but would could you suggest some books that you would recommend for beginners in silverlight?  Kind of off topic but could you also recommend any books for sharepoint and linq knowledge?  Thanks for coming to the conference, I found your sessions to be extremely informative especially the linq session on building n-tier asp.net applications with linq. Thx!                  P.S. Is it just me or do they blast these conference rooms with arctic air? It's like 80 outside and feels like 34  in this conference room.

# re: DevConnections Orlando Talks on Silverlight and LINQ/Entity Framework

Thursday, March 26, 2009 12:24 PM by dwahlin

Sam,

I'd agree with the artic air in the conference rooms.  I was freezing.  Then again, I live in Phoenix so I'm generally cold just about anywhere I go. :-)

As far as books, I (and 3 other Microsoft people) just released a book titled Professional Silverlight 2 for ASP.NET Developers.  It walks through all of the different features. I'd also check out Silverlight 2 Unleashed though.

For LINQ I like LINQ in Action the best at this point.  I don't have any n-tier asp.net application books so I can't really recommend any for that unfortunately.  I'm guessing there are some out there though.

Thanks for coming to the session(s).

Dan

# re: DevConnections Orlando Talks on Silverlight and LINQ/Entity Framework

Friday, March 27, 2009 5:42 PM by dave

I opened dataentry.sln with vs.net 2008.  Oddly it asked me if i wanted to upgrade.  I presume you used vs.net 2008.

# re: DevConnections Orlando Talks on Silverlight and LINQ/Entity Framework

Sunday, March 29, 2009 1:21 AM by dwahlin

Yep...it was created in VS 2008 SP1.  If you downloaded it right after the conference you may want to grab it again since I added some updates (such as the DB within the app_data folder).

# re: DevConnections Orlando Talks on Silverlight and LINQ/Entity Framework

Monday, March 30, 2009 3:32 PM by Kevin

Dan, I really enjoyed your sessions last week, however i am having an issue.  I am trying to create an imagebrush with a UNC path as the source.  

Dim photobrush As New ImageBrush

photobrush.ImageSource = New BitmapImage(New System.Uri(\\server\folder\file.jpg))

PhotoRect.Fill = photobrush

I can get my unc path to open directly in the browser so i would expect it to work here.  However i am getting a  ImageError error #4001 in control 'Xaml1': AG_E_NETWORK_ERROR message

# re: DevConnections Orlando Talks on Silverlight and LINQ/Entity Framework

Tuesday, March 31, 2009 1:28 AM by dwahlin

Kevin,

Thanks for attending the sessions...it was a fun week.  

As far as UNC, is there a reason you need to use that type of path? I haven't tried a UNC path in Silverlight but the client would have to have access to it which could present security issues, plus it would be a cross-domain call if the Silverlight control was served up using http (since the UNC path doesn't use that protocol).  Normally an HttpHandler or even bare-bones aspx page would grab the image on the server-side (from the UNC path if necessary) and then serve it up to Silverlight or another client-side app.

Dan