Fredrik Normén

I got a question as a comment on my previous post about the new features and changes to ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 Preview 5. I hope I understood the question right ;) It was about using a listbox and add an empty item at the top of the list, and keep it there when adding new items to an array that is bounded to the list, and by using the Observer feature. Maybe some more have or will have the same question, so I decided to write a blog post about it.

Microsoft have recently released the Preview 5 of ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 on CodePlex.

Note: This post is based on the July preview of the .NET RIA Services, so changes may happen in a future release of the framework

When building RIA with Silverlight, we will have some state issues we need to take care of. A Silverlight app by default is running in a browser, the browser have 3 bad buttons, Refresh, back and forward. If a user will press the Refresh button, the whole Silverlight app will be restarted. Same if they navigate from a Silverlight app with the back and forward buttons. If we build a RIA, our app will mostly hold the state for us on the client-side to reduce the number of round trip to the server etc. Lets assume a user will work with customer data. A user want to update the customer and information related to the customer. After 10 minutes of changes, the user suddenly by mistake refresh the page and all the data will be lost. So what we need to do when building RIA, is to remember the Refresh, back and forward buttons. This blog post will cover some of the Silverlight 3.0 features we can use to hold state and handle the Refresh, back and forward issues. This is something that I will also take up in my new updated Silverlight 3.0 course at Cornerstone (Where I work as an instructor, mentor, coach and consultant).

Now I’m back from my 4 week long vacation. I have spend a lot of time with my new apartment, took about 2 month to get most of it ready, I still have a lot of things to do, but all the painting and stuff are done :) I got a question on my e-mail regarding .NET RIA Services and the Business Application project’s UserRegistartionService. It was about the AddUser method in the Service and when and where it’s called. I thought it would be great to write a post about it.

I haven't blog for a while, the reason to this is that I moved to a new apartment three month ago, and have spend a lot of time with some decoration and finding new furniture etc. I have also been really busy with work until my vacation. I still have one week left out of four.

I have spend some time on the Silverligth.net forum and in the .NET RIA Services thread.. and just created a replay on a post about RIA Architecture and design.. I have some concerns regarding to how developers are using .NET RIA Services etc.. maybe it’s not a big deal.. but I will try to share my concerns and made a copy of my replay and created it as a blog post. I look forward to your comments. To get basic understanding about about my view of a RIA Architecture and also .NET RIA Servers, I prefer you read my two other blog post before you read this blog post.

Rich Internet Application (RIA) is an interesting topic. More and more business apps are moving into to the cloud, and more and more will have better User Experience (Ux). According to Gartner Research, nearly 60 percent of all new application development will include RIA technology by 2010. Today we can use different technologies to build a RIA, for example, AJAX, Flash and Silverlight etc. When it comes to AJAX we will soon reach the top of what we can do with it, because of the limitation of HTML, Client-side scripts and the browsers etc. That makes Silverlight and Flash more interesting regarding to me. But what is RIA? RIA It’s an internet applications that looks and feels like desktop applications, it also provide most of the maintainability and deployment benefits of Web applications. A RIA client can have state, so to increase User Experience, the user can work with data for a while until it will be passed down to the server for processing. Because the client side of a RIA can have state and work with data for a while, it’s extra important to have concurrency in mind. Some other users can have changed the data during the time we have worked with our copy. When developing RIA Clients we need to have several things in mind, for example a RIA is often running within an execution container in the Browser, so people can hit the refresh button or use the back and forward buttons, which can be reload the whole app and the current state can be gone. When we creates a large RIA, we can’t let users wait for hours until the application is loaded and started, so we need to load views etc on demand, and split them into small “modules”. Developing a RIA is not like developing a stateless ASP.NET app.