This is the third post in a series covering new line of business features in Silverlight 5.

This is the second post in a series covering new line of business features in Silverlight 5.

Silverlight 5 has a a lot of new features that are attractive to marketing and media application developers as well as Line of Business (LOB) developers. My company focuses on building LOB applications for customers so some of the new features related to that area of development really stood out to me. Over the next few weeks I’ll blog about a few of my personal favorites including:

I’m working with a team on a new customer project that uses Entity Framework Code First on the backend for CRUD operations. It’s been a nice ORM to work with since it really simplifies the process of mapping relational objects to CLR objects and lets you do it through fluent mappings. Working with Plain Old CLR Objects (POCOs) is something I’ve always liked since they keep the code base super clean and shiny. I can’t say that I really miss the .edmx files that I used previously with the database first or model first approaches.

I don’t consider myself a “fanboy” of any particular company even though my consulting and training business focuses on Microsoft technologies. A "fanboy" is someone that sides with a particular company regardless of how good or bad something is. I go with what I feel is best regardless of company. The .NET framework is my preference for developing Web and desktop applications and Visual Studio is untouchable as an integrated development environment in my opinion. iPad is my preference for a tablet, iPod for a music player, and Android for a phone (although I’d love to replace my Android device with a Windows Phone 7 device since I love the WP7 interface - Sprint still doesn’t have any WP7 devices that I like unfortunately).

In my previous series on Techniques, Strategies and Patterns for Structuring JavaScript Code I discussed the Revealing Module Pattern and explained how it provides a great way to structure JavaScript code while allowing members of an object to be made public or private. After the post went live an excellent question was asked in the comments section that I thought I’d address with a follow-up post:

Awhile back I was working on an ASP.NET MVC 3 project that required a lot of “standard” validation to be performed (required fields, validate lengths, some regular expression validation here and there, data type checks, etc.). Due to the number of classes involved I decided to go with the data annotations approach to keep things nice and tidy (some people love this, some people hate it – such is life :-)). As I dug more into the project I realized it was a fairly monumental task to create a metadata class for each of my model classes so I ended up investing one night to create a Visual Studio T4 template that could generate all of the metadata classes automatically based on an Entity Framework 4 model. I published the project up on CodePlex to make it easy for other devs to get to but realized I never blogged about it. Here’s an overview of what the T4 metadata and data annotations template does.