Not much stuck with me from years of Latin in high school, but the motto “Docendo discimus” has always served me well. “We learn by teaching” expresses one of my motivations for writing tutorials and creating presentations on the latest Microsoft technologies. The best way for me to grasp Silverlight 2 was to commit to an article or talk and then jump in head first to start figuring it out.
The ‘sink or swim’ approach leads to another observation: when a product is new, and documentation is sparse, what you need to know before you can do something, you learn by doing it. In other words, you muddle through and end up with valuable knowledge that you can share.
I was fascinated by the possibility of using Silverlight 2 as an alternative to ASP.NET business applications. The examples I found were either incomplete (didn’t actually save data) or over-engineered to be incomprehensible (by me, at least). So, I decided to build my own prototype and offer my learnings up as a series of screencasts.
The demo project is a small, but realistic example of how to create a CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) application against the familiar Northwind database. It uses the latest stuff from Microsoft including Windows Communication Foundation, ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria), and the Entity Framework.
Note to language bigots: I wrote the sample and screencasts in Visual Basic. There were several reasons: I’m more comfortable in VB (although I write lots of C#); there’s a dearth of sample Silverlight code in VB; and people who write only in C# don’t need beginner-level content because they already know everything. <grin>
I'm sure people will report more "correct", elegant, and efficient ways to create the application, and that's fine by me. The goal is to learn Silverlight 2 data handling, and I'm still learning too. I expect to add an episode on fixing the bugs. <grin>
I've put the first two episodes online today, using Microsoft's wonderful free Silverlight Streaming as the host. The remainder of the screencasts (probably a total of eight) will appear by the end of next week.
Here are the first two episodes:
Silverlight 2 Data Form - Episode 1
Silverlight 2 Data Form - Episode 2
You'll need these resources to follow along with the screencasts.
I hope you’ll profit from my adventure and judge for yourself whether Silverlight 2 is ready for a business application. I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts as feedback in the series' forum.