There are so many different ways to work with data that it can make your head spin.  Regardless of the technology, one thing I always try to do when working with databases is minimize the number of calls that are made.  I use ORM frameworks a lot so I have to make sure that my code doesn’t end up calling the database a ton and being overly “chatty”. 

Silverlight provides the ultimate in flexibility when it comes to styling controls.  If you don’t like how something looks you can tweak the template in a tool like Expression Blend quickly and easily and get something completely different.  This post is geared towards those of you who may just be getting into Silverlight.  My goal is to demonstrate how easy it is to change controls using a simple example that I just went through on a client application.

There are quite a few posts out there about switching to SSL when a user visits specific areas of a website but I figure the more the merrier so here’s yet another one.

Data binding is one of my favorite features and something that I use a lot while building Silverlight applications.  Silverlight makes it really easy to bind data to different controls and move data from controls back into the original bound object without having to write any C# or VB code in many cases.  Here’s an example of binding a ComboBox control to an object that defines a property named Branches:

I’ve been hearing a lot of people talk about how Silverlight 3 can or can’t do various things lately throughout the blogosphere and Twitter.  The sad part is that some of the people giving their two cents about what Silverlight can’t do haven’t built a “real world” application so I’m not sure how their opinion carries any weight (I know because I’ve asked a few of them). Their list of cons are typically based on what they heard on Twitter or various rumors floating around.  As with any technology there are pros and cons and Silverlight is no exception.  The goal of this post is to talk through some of the pros and cons I’ve personally encountered while building a “real world”, enterprise-scale timesheet and job management application for a large electrical contracting company.  I’ll point out what has worked really well and what hasn’t so that people looking to move applications to Silverlight 3 can get an honest assessment on what can be done and what can’t be done.

Silverlight has an excellent data binding engine that allows data to be bound through XAML or programmatically with code.  My number one reason for using Silverlight on client projects is the data binding support.  Once you get into it and understand how it works it can save a lot of time when building applications.

Expression Blend 3 is a great tool for creating Silverlight or WPF user interfaces using design time tools and controls.  If you haven’t tried version 3 you’re really missing out since it adds a ton of new time-saving features.

Expression Studio 3 has a great new feature that was announced and demonstrated back at the Mix 09 conference called SuperPreview.  It allows you to compare how a page looks across multiple browsers including IE6, IE7, IE8 and FireFox (with more reportedly coming in the future).  In this post I’m going to provide a quick look at SuperPreview and walk you through some screen shots to get you started using it.

After installing Expression Studio 3 I opened SuperPreview and saw the browsers shown in the image below.  The first thing you’ll notice is that you can test IE6.  Although I personally wish this browser would die and go away, my company still works with several clients who have large IE6 deployments across the enterprise so it’s nice to be able to test it easily.  Previously I used IETester (which works quite well) to test different versions of IE.