I finally got the time to finish reading and reviewing the book Microsoft Silverlight 5 and Windows Azure Enterprise Integration. By the way, the initial promotion of the book is up at the end of May, so now would be a good time to go buy.

My high level summary is this:

I think this book is an outstanding read and resource for developers and architects who are getting started with Windows Azure and what is involved in building cloud-based solutions. It does a great job of covering most of the capabilities exposed by the Windows Azure platform, and tying them into a Silverlight application context through the samples presented throughout the chapters. You do not have to be a Silverlight client developer to benefit from this book – any .NET developer who wants to start building applications leveraging the Windows Azure cloud can start with this book to get a great sense of what the individual features of Windows Azure are and how they can tie into either a web-based front end client like Silverlight or ASP.NET or even how to tie them in with back-end services that support something like a WPF or Metro client app (even though those are not explicitly covered in the book).

I won’t do a chapter-by-chapter break down of the book, a quick look at the TOC will give a good sense of what is covered. One of the main downsides to this book I think is the title. It is less about Silverlight than it is about Windows Azure (and as mentioned, you definitely don’t need to be a Silverlight developer to get a lot out of the book if you are new to Azure), and the “Enterprise Integration” part of the title is kind of vague and misleading. The “integration” part is one of the strong aspects of the book, it does a good job of first educating you on what each of the Windows Azure services is, and then shows how to build applications that leverage one or more of those services in an integrated fashion.

You are not going to learn how to build Silverlight applications from this book, or even become an expert in Windows Azure. Each feature of Azure really needs a book unto itself to achieve expert level knowledge in it. But this book is great for building the big picture of what each Windows Azure capability is, what it does for your architecture, how to use it from a basics perspective, and also how to tie it in with other Azure services and your application architecture.

Some of the things you get expose to in the book are:

- How to get your development environment set up to do Azure development, as well as a good survey of related and useful tools for building Silverlight and web client application on Azure

- A good survey of all the Windows Azure features

- How to get web client and Silverlight client applications and services hosted in Windows Azure web roles

- Working with Azure queues, blob storage, and tables

- Working with SQL Azure, Entity Framework, WCF RIA Services, and OData (very light coverage on the latter three, but enough to see how they fit into an Azure deployment scenario on top of SQL Azure)

- Basics of securing your Azure hosted applications

- Scaling and using AppFabric Cache

Bottom line, think it is definitely a good read for someone wanting to get their hands dirty for the first time doing some cloud Azure development, especially (but not only) if you are a Silverlight developer.

Friday, May 25, 2012 1:24:58 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
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I presented 4 sessions at VSLive NYC over the last two days and had a great time. I love the set up of this conference – not too spread out, good sized rooms, great attendees, and lots of great speakers.

Below are the slides and demos for those interested, enjoy!

Build Extensible XAML Client Applications:   Slides   Demos

Build Portable XAML Client Code and Resources:   Slides   Demos

Secure and Personalize Silverlight 5 Apps:   Slides   Demos

Learn to Behave – Extending XAML with Client Behaviors:   Slides   Demos

Wednesday, May 16, 2012 9:10:30 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
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I picked up a book that looks very interesting:

A bit of a mouthful, but the table of contents looks very good. There are a lot of Silverlight books out there, but few that actually focus on all the other stuff you need to know outside the boundary of your client application - the hosting, services, and deployment to Windows Azure. Its got chapters focused on the hosting, working with Azure storage, RIA Services, OData services and more. I'll write up a review here in a couple weeks after I've had time to make it through it.

Saturday, April 21, 2012 10:24:12 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
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Today I am giving three sessions at DevConnections. The first on the new ASP.NET Web API, both defining and consuming WEB API and RESTful services from many client platforms. The second is on the new async patterns in .NET and WinRT with the Task-based Asynchronous Pattern, TPL, and PFX. The last is on building extensible XAML client applications.

You can grab the slides and demos below.

Leveraging ASP.NET Web API to Reach Many Clients :   Slides    Demos

Embrace Async:    Slides    Demos

Building Extensible XAML Client Applications : Sides    Demos

Thursday, March 29, 2012 9:48:01 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
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Today I’ll be giving two sessions at DevConnections. The first is on building Rich HTML Client Data Applications with WCF RIA Services and Upshot. The second is on Building Loosely Coupled XAML Client Applications with Prism.

You can grab the slides and demos for these talks below.

Rich HTML Client Data Applications with Upshot:   Slides    Demos

Building Loosely Coupled XAML Client Applications with Prism:     Slides    Demos

Wednesday, March 28, 2012 9:26:16 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
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Part 4 of my article series on Prism 4 is live here. In this article, I cover the navigation features that were added to regions in Prism 4. These features let you use a loosely coupled URI-based navigation scheme for changing out or activating views within a region. The views (or their view models) can participate in the navigation by identifying if they are the target view for a navigation action, can be notified when they are navigated to with URI parameters, navigated away from. Additionally views (or their view models can decide if they should be navigated away from (such as to prompt the user) and when it should happen.

Read all the details here!

Friday, February 17, 2012 11:05:02 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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DevConnections Spring 2012 show is rapidly approaching, especially for us foolish speakers who submitted a bunch of talks, got a bunch selected, and now have to have put the slides and demos together in time for the show!

This year I’ll be giving 5 talks – 3 in the Visual Studio track and 2 in the Silverlight track. Here is a quick rundown of what I’ll be talking about.

VLA311 - Building Loosely Coupled XAML Apps with Prism

This will be a soup-to-nuts talk on what Prism has to offer, showing how you can employ parts of Prism with a light touch on your app such as commands and events, or going whole hog with what Prism has to offer by also embracing modularity and regions or dynamically pluggable and extensible client apps.

VLA412 - Embrace Async

In this I’ll be covering the new Task-based Async Pattern (async keywords) coming in .NET 4.5, Task Parallel Library, and a quick look at the Parallel class and PLINQ for dealing with collections in an async way.

VLA310 - Leveraging Web API to Reach Many Client Platforms

This one will cover the basics of the new Web API stack that allows you to easily expose HTTP services without needing to tackle the complexity of WCF, and also embrace the full REST architectural style if you want. The session will show the basics of exposing services with Web API on the service side, as well as how to consume them from multiple client platforms including .NET, Silverlight, Metro, and iOS.

CXA401 - Building Extensible XAML Client Apps

This session covers a rich combination of using MEF, MVVM, and Prism to build highly flexible and extensible XAML client applications. This one is an advanced session that really requires a trace of exposure to at least of couple of those technologies to really follow everything I’ll be packing into a 75 minute session. You’ll see how the right structure in a core application can gain you a huge advantage in being able to plug in new functionality without having to touch the core application code as you add incremental new capabilities to the application.

CHT303 - Rich HTML5 Client Data Applications with WCF RIA Services

This session explores another great new capability coming in the next release of web technologies. It covers a new set of JavaScript libraries being developed by Microsoft to both extend the reach of WCF RIA Services to HTML client applications, and also to allow rich stateful interactions with data on the client side of an HTML application in JavaScript, following similar patterns as are used in Silverlight clients with WCF RIA Services.

I’m very excited about talking about all this cool new capability headed our way, and hope to see you there!

Friday, February 10, 2012 5:22:38 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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PArt 3 of my series on Prism 4 is now live on the Silverlight Show here. This one drills down into CompositeCommands and Prism pub/sub events with the EventAggregator. I show how to use CompositeCommands to hook up loosely coupled parts of the app but still have the enable/disable functionality that commands off that events do not. Then I show using Prism events to keep two loosely coupled parts of the user interface synchronized without them needing to know about each other.

Check it out!

Sunday, January 29, 2012 4:29:51 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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I’ve started a new article series on The Silverlight Show site that will be covering Prism 4 end to end over about 5-6 articles. The first installment is up: Working with Prism 4 Series Part 1 – Getting Started. This one covers the broad concepts of what Prism is for, what features it offers, and walks you through putting together a basic Prism app with one module and plugging a view into a region.

I should be putting a new installment up every two weeks. In the next article, I’ll be putting a little more functionality into a couple of views, including using commands and the MVVM pattern, and communicating between the view with Prism loosely coupled events. After that I will expand on using region navigation, implementing custom module loaders, and other aspects.

Hope you check it out!

Tuesday, November 15, 2011 1:55:39 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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My class is now confirmed for 28 Nov – 2 Dec with our training partner Benchmark Learning, but there are still seats available. You can find the full syllabus and registration information here:

http://www.benchmarklearning.com/Courses/CrsDetail.aspx?C=IDWPFMaster

Sign up now!

Friday, November 11, 2011 6:55:23 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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