In March of this year SP1 of WCF RIA Services was released together with SP1 of Visual Studio 2010. Soon this was followed by a new version of the WCF RIA Services Toolkit. Microsoft has changed a few things in SP1 which makes it possible for you to implement you own code generation classes that can manipulate the client code generation of RIA Services entities, contexts, … In my opinion this is a great new feature which is very powerful when you are building your own Silverlight framework. So in this article I will describe how the code generation in RIA services SP1 works and I will demonstrate some scenarios and ideas were customizing the generated code is a nice technique to extend your own framework.

• WCF RIA Services code generation
• Setup of demo application
• Installation of Toolkit
• T4 Code generation classes
• Adding interfaces to the generated entities
• Adding attributes to the generated entities
• Using derived data annotation attributes
• Adding XML comments to the generated entities
• Using derived classes for entities, domain contexts and the web context
• Implementing your own logic in the derived classes

Over the last few weeks I’ve been writing a series of articles that cover some great improvements in the Entity Framework 4.0 In this third article I will explore some SqlClr features and show how to call custom .NET functions and aggregates in LINQ to Entities queries.

• SqlClr
  • Creating SqlClr user defined functions
  • Deploying SqlClr functions
  • Calling the SqlClr functions in SQL
  • Calling the SqlClr functions in LINQ to Entities
  • Sharing functions between LINQ to Objects and LINQ to Entities
  • Creating SqlClr User Defined aggregates
  • Calling the SqlClr aggregates in SQL
  • Calling the SqlClr aggregates in LINQ to Entities

In this second article about the Entity Framework version 4.0 user defined functions and the new Model Defined Functions will be explored.

Based on a series of simple examples I will show how to map UDF’s and Entity SQL expressions to Model Defined Functions and how to call them in LINQ to Entities queries.

• User Defined Functions (UDF)
  • Mapping functions to CRUD operations
  • Calling UDF’s in Entity SQL statements
• Creating custom functions in the storage model
• Model Defined Functions
  • SqlFunctions
  • Mapping UDF’s to Model Defined Functions
  • Mapping Entity SQL expressions to Model Defined Functions
  • EntityFunctions

The Entity Framework together with LINQ to Entities are very powerful technologies to access and manipulate data from a database. At first glance everyone is impressed by the conceptual layer which is mapped to tables in a database. When building large scale enterprise applications you will notice that the EF has a few shortcomings. When you need to gain performance or need extra security, stored procedures and user defined functions are often required. In this first article in a series of three I will focus on how to use stored procedures in the Entity Framework 4.0. In the second article I will demonstrate how to map user defined functions to model defined functions and to call them in LINQ to Entities queries. And in the final article SqlClr functions will be explored.

• Stored procedures (SP/SPROC)
• Stored procedures examples
  • SalesByCategory
  • UpdateProductPrices
  • UpdateCategory
  • GetCategoryCount
• Importing stored procedures in the EDM
• Mapping functions to CRUD operations
• Adding Function Imports
• No return value
• Returning a scalar value
• Returning a complex type

A few weeks ago Visual Studio 2010 & .NET 4.0 (CLR, BCL, WPF, WCF, EF, …) release candidates have been released. Last week during the MIX ’10 conference Silverlight 4 & WCF RIA Services v1 RC have been set online. Also a first community preview of Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 has been released. So it’s time to roundup all download locations and links to useful articles, blog posts, videos, samples, …

Visual Studio 2010

• Downloads: Microsoft Portal with download links for all Visual Studio editions (Professional, Premium & Ultimate), Team Foundation Server, SDK, Azure, …
• Article: Team Foundation Server 2010 Key Concepts
• Article: Team Foundation Server 2010: What’s new (Jakob Ehn)
• Article: What’s new for Database projects in VS 2010
• Article: What’s new in Code Analysis for Visual Studio 2010
• Blog: Into Visual Studio Team System (Pieter Gheysens)
• Blog: Visual Studio 2010 Profiler

.NET 4.0

• Article: What’s new in the Base Class Libraries in .NET 4.0 RC
• Article: What’s new in the Base Class Libraries in .NET 4.0 beta (Justin Van Patten)
• Article: Parallelism in .NET 4.0 (Reed Copsey)

Entity Framework 4.0

• Article: What’s new in Entity Framework 4.0 RC
• Blog: Entity Framework 4.0

WPF 4.0

• Article: What’s new in WPF 4.0 (Scott Guthrie)
• Article: What’s new in WPF 4.0 beta 2 (Jaime Rodriguez)
  

WCF 4.0

• Article: What’s new in WCF 4.0 (Santosh Benjamin)

WIF

• Download: Windows Identity Foundation SDK

Silverlight 4.0

• Downloads: Silverlight 4.0, Blend 4.0 beta, WCF RIA Services
• Article: What’s new in Silverlight 4.0
• Article: What has changed in the Silverlight 4.0 RC (Tim Heuer)
• Blog: Silverlight 4.0 features (Mike Taulty)
• Article: WCF RIA Services road to RTW via RC (Dinesh Kulkarni)
• Videos: Silverlight 4 training courses
• Blog: WCF RIA Services (Brad Abrams)

Windows Phone Tools

• Downloads: Windows Phone Portal with download links, articles, videos, samples, …
• Article: Silverlight for WP7 vs Silverlight 3 & 4 (Bart Czernicki)

Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4 offer a lot of new features. I like all the new features but I was especially interested in improvements that could help my current developments which are based on a M-V-VM architecture with ViewModels and a lot of bindings with UI controls. So I wrote an article and published it on my personal website. The article will focus on the improved design-time features. Along the way I will show a lot of screenshots and try to cover some other new Silverlight 4 features.

• Domain entities and WCF RIA Services
• Base classes and ViewModel interface and implementation
  • ViewModel interface
  • ViewModelBase class
  • DelegateCommand class
  • ProductViewModel class
• XAML designer
• Design-time properties
  • DesignWidth and DesignHeight
  • DataContext and DesignInstance
• Properties window and databinding
  • TextBox
  • Button and Command
  • ListBox
  • DataGrid
• Showing data in Design-time
  • Design-time ViewModel
  • IsDesignTimeCreatable
• Other Silverlight 4 DataBinding improvements
  • String indexers
  • Dependency Objects
  • StringFormat & TextTrimming
• Data Sources window

Yesterday Microsoft released some new preview and beta versions of Silverlight, RIA Services, Blend, Media Framework, Toolkit, … It looks like a major update with a lot of new features (webcam support, RichText control, HTML content, access to local files, drag and drop, ICommand, right clicks and mouse wheel support, …) and improvements (data binding, validation, DataGrid, clipboard, styles, unit testing, …) In this post I will refer to the most interesting posts:

• Tim Heuer gives a great overview with some videos of all new features in Silverlight 4 beta.
• Fore more detailed information and examples about Silverlight 4 you should take a look at Mike Taulty’s posts.
• Also Alex Golesh started posting a lot of detailed examples.
• On Channel9 you can find several hands-on-labs from John Papa that demonstrate all new Silverlight 4 features.
• Nick Kramer posted a Word document with an overview of the new security features in Silverlight 4.
• Jeff Wilcox posted a large walkthrough to demonstrate how to use the Silverlight unit testing tools.
• In the RIA Services forum you will find more information about the new preview of WCF RIA Services. Don’t forget to read the “Breaking changes” document.
• And Brad Abrams describes the new features in WCF RIA Services CTP that are based on feedback of us developers and he also posted a nice step-by-step guide of his demo at PDC 2009.
• Gill Cleeren succeeded in creating a blogpost about Silverlight 4 for each day of the month December.

Silverlight and RIA Services are great technologies and the Model-View-ViewModel (M-V-VM) pattern is a nice approach to keep UI and logic separated. But using the combination of view models with item controls, dataforms and commands can be a laborious task because the databinding features in Silverlight are quite limited. I posted an article on my website in which I demonstrate how binding with ViewModels can be improved by using the BindingHelper class and by creating your own command behaviors.

• Access ViewModel properties in a ListBoxItem
• Access ListBoxItem properties in a ListBoxItem
• Access Commands in a ListBoxItem
• Access ViewModel properties and Commands in a DataForm
• INotifyPropertyChanged vs. DependencyProperty in a ViewModel

Last week Microsoft released the official version of Silverlight 3, a new CTP (July 2009) of RIA Services and a RC of Expression Blend 3.0. SL3 is a major update and it is released 9 months after version 2.0, which is quite fast. SL3 provides out of the browser support, HD media support, better graphics, improved data binding, search engine optimization (SEO) support, … It seems that SL3 RTW disables the designer in Visual Studio 2008 because people were having a lot of problems with it. Fortunately the future version 2010 will provide a fully interactive WYSIWYG designer including data binding support within the designer.

Following links can be used to download all the needed setups. Make sure to uninstall the previous versions first.

• Microsoft Silverlight 3 runtime, tools & SDK for Visual Studio 2008 SP1
• Microsoft Silverlight 3 offline documentation (CHM)
• Microsoft Expression Blend 3 + SketchFlow RC (trial)
• Silverlight Toolkit July 2009
• Microsoft .NET RIA Services July 2009 CTP

It seems that these releases contain a lot of breaking changes. I’m already struggling 2 days to migrate a project that has been developed with Silverlight 3 beta and RIA Services CTP May. In SL3 the DataForm has been redesigned and there are changes in the AutoCompleteBox and DataGrid controls. In RIA Services a lot of things have been improved but also changed drastically; code sharing, loading data, authentication, custom validation, update parameters, …

Following blog posts and articles will help you to migrate:

• What is new in Silverlight 3 (Tim Heuer)
• Silverlight 3 changes
• RIA Services July 2009 overview: make sure to read this document again because a lot of chapters have been rewritten or added. Chapter 25 describes all the breaking changes.
• Silverlight Toolkit July 2009 change list

Last week I attended a two day Microsoft training about Windows 7 for Developers at U2U. We took a closer look at the Release Candidate and it’s features for developers.  It was quite interesting to see how to develop applications that use specific Windows 7 features like the new taskbar (thumb previews, jump lists, icon overlays), ribbons, multi touch, UAC, power management, sensors and location, Direct2D, DirectWrite, …

Afterwards I take some time to look up some extra information, libraries and tools. I found a lot of interesting websites and blog posts and so I summarize them here:

Windows 7

Microsoft already created a website with all information and downloads for Windows 7

• http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7

Another very interesting source is Paul Thurott’s Supersite for Windows

• http://www.winsupersite.com/faq/windows_7.asp

As a developer you really should follow up the posts at the hereunder blogs. Sergey Zwezdin posted 10 great posts about programming Windows 7.

• http://geekswithblogs.net/sergun/Default.aspx
• http://blogs.msdn.com/yochay/default.aspx

There are several Windows 7 forums with a lot of interesting posts. You surely should checkout the Tutorials section of SevenForums.

• http://www.sevenforums.com
• http://www.w7forums.com
• http://windows7forums.com

Windows API Code Pack

The Windows API Code Pack contains several .NET libraries to access all the new Windows 7 features. This MSDN Code Gallery page also provides several videos.

• http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/WindowsAPICodePack

Federated Search (ODSX)

Following articles explain how to create your own Federated Search OSDX files. Popular OSDX files for Live, Google, MSDN, Wikipedia, Flickr, … can also be downloaded.

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd742951(VS.85).aspx
• http://www.windows7hacker.com/index.php/2009/04/how-to-create-custom-open-search-in-windows-7
• http://www.blogsdna.com/2307/windows-7-search-connectors-for-google-youtube-yahoo-wikipedia-twitter.htm
• http://www.beingmanan.com/wp/2009/01/windows-7-resources-built-how-to-on-themes-connectors
• http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/742-windows-7-search-federation-providers.html

Boot from VHD files

Windows 7 offers great support for virtual harddisks and following articles describe how to create and mount these virtual harddisk VHD files and how to boot from them.

• http://edge.technet.com/Media/Windows-7-Boot-from-VHD
• http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=3324

Library XML files

Windows 7 introduces the concept of libraries. A library is an aggregate of many different folders and it provides a view for specific content types. I noticed that there is no way to change a Library icon via the Windows UI. Following forum post explains where you can find the XML files which describe a Library and how to add a custom icon.

• http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/3011-libraries-icons-change.html

Run as different user

In Windows 7 the “Run as” option is not visible by default. It seems that it is implemented as an extended menu which is only displayed if you hold the SHIFT key. More info can be found at following forum post:

• http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/419-run-different-user.html

Ribbon

The WPF Ribbon control, a UI control that will replace menus, toolbars and popup windows in future applications, can be downloaded at Codeplex :

• http://wpf.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?title=WPF%20Ribbon%20Preview

UAC

The User Account Control Helpers library is a project on CodePlex supporting all the UAC features of Windows Vista and Windows 7. It facilitates interaction with the UAC mechanism, handles manifest creation, extraction and embedding, and more.

• http://uachelpers.codeplex.com

Compatibility

Microsoft provides a Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) that contains all the necessary tools and documentation to evaluate and mitigate application compatibility issues before deploying applications to Windows 7. The toolkit already contains a lot of shims but you can also create your own shims to force privileged rights or program files or registry virtualization to run older applications.

• http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=24DA89E9-B581-47B0-B45E-492DD6DA2971&displaylang=en

Instrumentation

Following MSDN page provides a good overview of all the performance analysis, instrumentation, WMI, … features and tools:

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/performance/default.aspx

If you are using WMI, you definitely should check out the LINQ to WMI project at CodePlex:

• http://www.codeplex.com/linq2wmi

Training Kit

Update: The official Windows 7 Training Kit for Developers can be downloaded at the Microsoft website

• http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=1c333f06-fadb-4d93-9c80-402621c600e7&displaylang=en

A few months ago Microsoft released the first preview of .NET RIA Services. This new framework promises to simplify building n-tier Line of Business (LoB) applications by providing patterns, components and tools to build services, query data, handle CRUD operations, resolve concurrency, manage data validation, … The March 2009 and the new May 2009 CTP’s only support Silverlight 3 but the final version will also offer support for ASP.NET/MVC/AJAX and WPF.

I have been exploring RIA services for a few weeks now and I must admit that I’m really excited. The architectural design looks quite good, these first CTP’s work fine and it really boosts productivity. The RIA Services framework handles all the plumbing to move entities from the server to the client, it offers advanced change-tracking and caching, several techniques for data validation are provided, there is support for authentication and roles, the integration with Silverlight UI controls like DataForm and DataPager works great and the current support for the ADO.NET Entity Framework really simplifies certain tasks.

If you want to start exploring RIA Services then you should definitely start reading the PDF document that Microsoft has published. This document gives a very good overview of all features of RIA Services.

While using RIA Services I found several great features that I wanted to blog about. In the coming months I will try to write a series of articles about RIA Services. I will not explain the details about its design, but I will try to give a lot of code samples, tips and ideas. I also stumbled upon some limitations and shortcomings of the current preview. So in this first article I will focus on the current limitations and I will offer you some of my workarounds and tips.

• Multiple server side projects
• Multiple client side projects
• ReSharper and Intellisense
• Metadata files
• Metadata attributes
• Operation parameters
• Validation exceptions
• Loading one entity
• Server side problems
• Client side problems
• Assocations and Entity Framework entities
  • Many-to-one
  • Many-to-many
  • Self referencing
• May CTP changes

Last week Christophe Geers, a friend of mine, posted a great article about the Live Mesh services and framework. Live Mesh is one of the building blocks of Microsoft’s Azure platform and it allows you to easily synchronize files with all your devices (PC, PDA, smartphone, …) The great thing for us developers is that it also provides REST-based API’s which can be used to query the shared files or to store all kinds of data.

Christophe demonstrates how to query the Mesh, how to create folders and how to upload and download files.

Some months ago another Belgian .NET developer (and trainer) Peter Himschoot also posted an article about Live Mesh which explains how to create your own data structures and how to store and retrieve data.

A few weeks ago I started testing the beta version of LINQPad 1.35. Some days ago it has been officially released. This great tool from Joe Albahari was introduced in 2007 and nowadays it has become a very mature tool which should be in the toolbox of every .NET developer.

Version 1.35 offers new connection providers and it has native support for LINQ to SQL and the Entity Framework models. It also provides new query types like SQL and Entity-SQL.

I am a fan of this tool and I already demonstrated its features in many of my articles. I was probably one of the first developers who used LINQPad to execute LINQ to Entities queries. In the past you needed to add some references and create the ObjectContext in each script. It was a bit of work but it functioned fine. Now you can do the same thing with the new connection providers but they also offer many advantages. In a small article which can found on my website I will highlight some of the new features.

A week ago Microsoft demonstrated the first beta of Silverlight 3 and the new RIA Services framework on the MIX09 conference in Vegas. A lot of shortcomings from Silverlight 2 are solved and many new interesting features have been added. Following weeks and months I will try to examine all the new Silverlight features and explore some approaches to integrate the RIA services. In this post I will try to give a roundup of all interesting articles and blog posts.

Downloads

• The Get Started page from the Silverlight website provides links to all setups you need to install Silverlight 3 beta, the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio, the SDK, the RIA Services and a trial version of Expression Blend 3.

Silverlight 3

• The same Get Started page also describes all the new features of Silverlight 3 (new controls, data binding improvements, data validation, WCF improvements, higher quality video and audio, 3D support, skinning, new effects and animations, search engine optimization and deep linking, out of the browser capabilities, save file dialog, …).
• Following link is an interesting e-book (PDF) from Laurence Moroney who takes a first look at Silverlight 3.
• Tim Heuer also posted an interesting overview of all the new features.
• And Mike Taulty’s blog contains several posts with a lot of source code and screenshots about some new cool things.

WCF

• Yavor Georgiev from the Silverlight Web Services Team posted an overview of the WCF improvements in Silverlight 3 (binary encoding, faults support, duplex serivces, credentials transport, …)
• And Jimmy Lewis describes how to fix a problem with Silverlight enabled-webservices when Silverlight 2 SDK is installed.

SEO

• Following blog contains some posts about the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) features of Silverlight 3.

Application Extensibility

• Andrea Boschin describes in his blogpost the new IApplicationService interface which can be used to build client side services.

Graphics & 3D

• Pete Brown’ blog contains a lot of posts about 3D transforms, Bitmap API, Pixel Shader, …
• Also Andy Beaulieu posted a lot about Pixel Shaders, GPU acceleration, Bitmap caching, …
• Andrea Boshin demonstrates his TileEffect with the Pixel Shader.
• Jeff Prosise shows how to use the Pixel Shader and the High-Level Shading Language (HLSL) to create fancy effects like his WateryEffect.
• Jaime Rodriguez announces that more than 20 effects from the WPF Effects Library have been converted to Silverlight 3.

Out of the browser

• Mike Taulty has a blogpost which shows how to run a Silverlight application outside the browser.
• Also Andrea Boshin demonstrates these features.

Controls & Silverlight Toolkit

• Yifung Lin provides a quick overview of the new features in the DataGrid.
• A lot of controls from the previous CodePlex Silverlight Toolkit release have been moved to the new Silverlight release. The Toolkit itself has been updated and the march 2009 release contains new controls (Accordion, DomainUpDown, ChildWindow, …) and a lot of improvements. The package can be downloaded via following link. The Wiki page describes all the changes in this latest release.
• Ning Zhang posted an article with a lot of screenshots which demonstrates the new design time features.
• Ruurd Boeke’s blog contains detailed posts about several new controls like DomainUpDown, Accordion, …
• And the following blog post describes the performance improvements in the charting controls.
• Jef Wilcox has already updated and improved his AutoCompleteBox Highlighting controls.

RIA Services

The new RIA Services is a framework to simplify building n-tier Line of Business (LoB) applications. This framework provides patterns, components and tools to build services, query data, handle CRUD operations, resolve concurrency, manage data validation, … It looks promising so you should at least take a look at the current documentation.

• Microsoft published an interesting PDF document which gives a full overview of all its features.
• Several sample applications can be found at the MSDN code gallery.
• Nikhil Kothari explains the architectural concepts behind RIA Services.

Tools

• Koen Zwikstra already released an update for this great Silverlight Spy tool which now supports Silverlight 3 and IE8.

Videos

All sessions from MIX09 have been recorded and these video files are available on the internet. Following page gives an overview of the 24 Silverlight related videos. Of course a lot of these sessions were interesting but in my opinion following ones are the most fascinating.

• What’s New in Microsoft Silverlight 3 (Joe Stegman)
• RIA Services – Building Data-Driven Applications with Microsoft Silverlight and Microsoft ASP.NET (Nikhil Kothari)
• High-Speed RIA Development with the Microsoft Silverlight Toolkit (Shawn Oster)
• Offline Network Detection in Microsoft Silverlight 3 (Peter Smith)
• Consuming Web Services in Microsoft Silverlight 3 (Eugene Osovetsky)

Today I installed the public beta of ReSharper 4.5. I’m using this tool for more than a year and I really like it. ReSharper integrates in every part of the IDE of Visual Studio and it offers me a big productivity boost. ReSharper provides a lot of great features like all kinds of coding assistance, handy refactorings, code cleanup wizards, fast navigation and search popups, …

The new version 4.5 is mostly about increasing performance and indeed the tool looks even more responsive. Besides it also offers several improvements and I especially like the following onces:

• Better Silverlight support: code assistance for datatemplates in XAML, …
• MSTest support: the handy unit test explorer can now be used together with MSTest.
• New solution-wide warnings and suggestions: unassigned fields, suspicious type conversions or checks, …
• New naming style configuration for variables, fields, properties, events, methods, enums, interfaces, classes, …
• New and improved refactorings.

A detailed list of the new features and the download link for this beta version can be found on the website of JetBrains: http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/beta.html

Finally I would like to recommend a great plugin for ReSharper. StyleCopForResharper is a plugin which adds all the StyleCop (=Style Analysis) rules to the code assistant and cleanup wizard of ReSharper. It is not so easy to find the perfect combination of all the rules from Code Analyses, ReSharper and StyleCop but you really should give it a try: http://www.codeplex.com/StyleCopForReSharper