July 2009 - Posts
One of the things that I really thing would be important for Silverlight in order to make easier the Modularity of the Business applications developed in Silverlight, since the Prism approach is nice but I think that the MEF approach is simpler and so this should be a breakthrough for Silverlight Business Application Development.
After some talks with Brad Adams from Microsoft and also posting some feedback I came to this very interesting post of Brad that talks about how can we use the MEF for Silverlight that was made available on the CodePlex site related to MEF.
Brad make a very good example of the usage of MEF in this blog post.
So enjoy the reading and good coding.
Recently I posted about .NET RIA Services that is a framework that is associated with Silverlight and will make the development of business applications easier.
So here a some more links in order to understand .NET RIA Services better.
Have a nice reading about .NET RIA Services
Silverlight 3 has been release and now we have also the Unit Testing Framework binaries here that will help making Unit Tests in our solutions when using Silverlight 3. More information’s here.
Also important is the release of Prism Visual Studio Templates that will help developers get using the Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight, and make what seems to be hard, simpler, and also with the new MVVM pattern available.
Download the Prism Visual Studio Templates here.
Update to the Prism Visual Studio Templates here.
More information about the Prism Visual Studio Templates here.
Windows Azure has a new SDK release that is now available. A very interesting new feature is the possibility of having several Roles per deployment, unlike what happened in earlier releases where we would only be able to have one Web Role and also a one Worker Role. Another interesting feature is now we have the possibility to chose between a normal ASP.NET Web Forms application and a ASP.NET MVC application as the Web Role.
Download the Visual Studio Tools here.
Download the Windows Azure SDK here.
As you probably all know Windows 7 will be made available on October 22nd , but the release will be made in phases and so in order to know when you can get you RTM version here’s a summary:
- For Partners & OEMs
- ISV and IHV
- English Version - August 6th on Microsoft Connect and MSDN.
- Other languages – October 1st
- Gold and Certified Partners
- English Version – August 16th on Microsoft Partner Network
- Other languages – October 1st
- Action Pack Subscribers
- English Version – August 23rd
- Other languages – October 1st
- OEMs
- 2 days after the Official RTM Version
- For Business Customers:
- Volume Licensing with Software Assurance
- English Version – August 7th via Volume License Service Center
- Volume Licensing without Software Assurance
- English Version – September 1st
- For IT Professionals
- English Version – August 6th via TechNet
- Other languages – October 1st
- For Developers
- English Version – August 6th via MSDN
- Other languages – October 1st
- For Customers
More information here.
Microsoft announced on 14th July the commercial availability of Windows Azure as I posted previously and now there are more information’s about the the same subject so I decided to write again on the subject.
Important elements to retain:
“During Community Technology Preview (CTP), services included in Windows Azure will be available without charge - subject to certain limits:
- Total compute usage: 2000 VM hours
- Cloud storage capacity: 50GB
- Total storage bandwidth: 20GB/day“
How Consumption is Measured:
- How Consumption is Measured?
- Windows Azure
- SLA
- “(…)we guarantee that when you deploy two or more role instances in different fault and upgrade domains your Internet facing roles will have external connectivity at least 99.95% of the time (…)”
- Compute time, measured in machine hours
- Storage, measured in GB
- Bandwidth requirements (transmissions to and from the Azure datacenter), measured in GB
- Transactions
- SQL Data Services
- SLA
- “(…) will maintain a “Monthly Availability” of 99.9% during a calendar month. “Monthly Availability Percentage” for a specific customer database is the ratio of the time the database was available to customer to the total time in a month. Time is measured in 5-minute intervals in a 30-day monthly cycle. (…)”
- Web Edition Relational Database includes:
- Up to 1 GB of T-SQL based relational database
- Self-managed DB, auto high availability and backup
- Auto Scale with pay-as-you grow
- Best suited for Web application, Departmental custom apps.
- Business Edition DB includes:
- Up to 10 GB of T-SQL based relational database
- Self-managed DB, auto high availability and backup
- Auto Scale, Pay-as- you grow
- Additional features in the future like auto-partition, CLR, fanouts etc.
- Best suited for ISVs packaged LOB apps, Department custom apps
- NET Services
- “(…)Uptime percentage commitments and SLA credits for .NET Services are equivalent to those specified above in the Windows Azure SLA. Due to inherent differences between the technologies, underlying SLA definitions and terms differ for .NET Services. Using the Service Bus module of .NET Services, customers will have connectivity between a customer’s service endpoint and our Internet gateway(…)”
- Messages are charged to the customer in discrete blocks of 100,000 (“100k”) for each monthly billing period, meaning that
- A customer who consumed 95,000 messages would be billed for 1x100k messages (plus the bandwidth used to send messages in or out).
- A customer who uses 150,000 messages in a billing period would be charged for 2x100k messages (plus the bandwidth used to send messages in or out).
- A customer who uses 20 million messages in a billing period would be charged
More information can be be found on the Windows Azure site.
.NET RIA Services is a framework that is associated with Silverlight and will make the development of business applications easier.
In order to know more I decided to compile a set of articles that I think are very interesting to understand .NET RIA Services better.
Have a nice reading about .NET RIA Services
As you might already know Silverlight 3 RTW is out and with it the great power of Silverlight 3 was unleashed.
The main features made available are:
- Tools
- Expression Blend 3 RC
- Ability to Import Photoshop and Illustrator
- SketchFlow
- State Management
- Visual Studio 2010
- Still in Beta 1 version but with a strong design tools for Silverlight
- Controls
- DataForm
- Simple control that enabled a flexible way to display data of a single entity definition. Support several methods such as Display, Edit and Update and navigating to data.
- DataPager
- This control gives Paging support such as Next/Previous and Numeric paging on elements that implement the IPageViewCollection interface.
- Navigation Framework
- A Framework that will provide an easy way to provide navigation to applications, and that introduces to Silverlight 2 new controls, called Frame and Page. With it we can partition views into separate XAML files and navigate to each view independently. Also integrates with Browser history providing Browser Back and Forward functions.
- SEO – Search Engine Optimization
- Deep Linking
- Possibility to navigate directly to a specific page in the Silverlight solution
- New toolkit controls
- Media
- Support for H.264 and AAC encoding
- Raw audio/video pipeline support that will provide audio/video decoding outside the runtime and render in Silverlight
- Graphics
- Perspective 3D
- Support for 3D scenarios and putting object on a plane for various user experience scenarios.
- Pixel Effects
- Support for Pixel Shader Effects
- Animation Easing
- Provides a set of possibilities that will interpolate the animations and provide smoother animation transitions and other visual effects
- Bitmap API
- GPU Acceleration
- Text/Image Improvements
- Element-to-Element Binding
- Local Connection API
- Enable scenarios in order to Silverlight solutions to communicate with each other through an asynchronous messaging system. A pub-sub implementation for Silverlight applications.
- Binding Validation API
- SaveFileDialog
- Dynamic Styling and Based On
- Support for DynamicResource
- Support for Based On Styles
- Caret Brush
- Merged Resource Dictionaries
- Assembly Caching
- Possibility of having the Silverlight solutions load core runtime from a runtime cache rather than having it on the xap file.
- Network monitoring API
- Possibility to check network status changes.
- Out-of-Browser and Offline
- Possibility to have the applications run on and off the browser and Offline also, having it work like a desktop solution.
- Binary XML
- Ability to communicate using WCF with Binary XML data format and providing smaller communications,
- Web Service Utility
- Slsvcutil.exe that works like the regular WCF svcutil tool but specific for Silverlight
- .NET RIA Services (Still in CTP version)
- A complete framework that will provide an easy way to develop using the n-tier pattern using the power of ASP.NET to help Silverlight to achieve this.
Know more on the Get Started session of Silverlight.net site.
Just today in the WPC 2009 Microsoft announced the Commercial Availability and Business Model that will be used in Windows Azure and Windows Azure Service Platform, and so a brief info about the amounts involved.
- Windows Azure
- Compute – 0.12 $ per hour
- Storage – 0.15 $ per GB by month stored
- Storage Transactions – 0.01 $ per 10K
- SQL Data Services
- Web Edition – up to 1 GB relational Database – 9.99 $ per month
- Business Edition – up to 10 GB relational Database – 99.99 $ per month
- .NET Services (includes Service Bus, Access Control)
- Messages – 0.15 $ per 100K message operations
- Bandwidth across all three services will be charged:
- 0.10$ for inbound communications
- 0.15$ for outbound communications
Guarantee Availability:
- at least 99,95 % for external connectivity
- at least 99,9% for storage
Availability at launch will be Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, India, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, and the United States.
In the March 2010 timeframe we expect commercial availability to expand to Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, South Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland, Puerto Rico, Romania, Singapore, and Taiwan.
More information's here.
.NET Services July 2009 CTP Release
An one more CTP of Windows Azure was made available and this one has some interesting points like Windows 7 RC Support, easier setup, but of course the large amount of changes is in terms of connecting heterogeneous environments, in terms of:
- Connect Applications and users
- Interoperability by Default, very important since it supports now even more standards than before
- Federation of Data, Messages, Identity and Access, that makes solutions more easier to interoperate between each other.
Of course this changes occur in the spectrum of the .NET Services Bus and Access Control, since the Workflow Services is now offline in order to incorporate more customer feedback.
Check more information here.
SQL Data Services
Now we can look at SQL Data Services as a real Database, and now give support for TSQL in SQL Data Services, of course in this release we only have a subset of TSQL, but this is a good way to go.
Of course there are differences between SQL Server on-Premise and SQL Data Services and some of they are:
“(…)
- SDS is a multi-tenant system
- The hardware resources are owned, hosted and maintained by Microsoft
- SDS is a service
(…)”
So what’s in?
- DDL
- FUNCTION
- INDEX
- PROCEDURE
- ROLE
- SCHEMA
- STATISTICS
- SYNONIM
- TABLE
- TRIGGER
- VIEW
- DML
- SELECT/INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE functionality
- DML triggers
- JOINs
- Transactions
- A large number of built-in functions (aggregates, math, date and time, ranking, etc.)
- Manageability
- Query tuning via SET SHOWPLAN and SET STATISTICS
- Index tuning via create and drop index
- Statistic management via UPDATE STATISTICS
- Information schema views and system catalog views (e.g., sys.databases)
- Local HA is automatically provided as part of the service.
- Upcoming version of SSMS and VS tools will work against SDS
Ok very nice v1 of SQL Data Services, check more in this post from the SQL Data Services Team.
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