Today at DevConnections I’ll be presenting an overview talk on WCF RIA Services. I wanted to make the demos available to the attendees and anyone else who wants them, so here they are:

WCF RIA Services demos

Tuesday, March 29, 2011 2:33:21 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
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I did a podcast interview on a podcast a lot of people have probably not heard of yet, but should check out called Cloud Plumbing.

In my interview, we discussed the positioning of WCF RIA Services compared to other service technologies and UI technologies. If you are not quite sure about when WCF RIA Services might be appropriate for you, this would be a great listen to get you started.

Thursday, March 24, 2011 10:04:37 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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I’m going to be doing a Webinar next week for the Silverlight Show highlighting the features of WCF RIA Services for validation. This is one of my favorite aspects of RIA Services because it makes validation so incredibly easy. You can use validation attributes from the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace and they will be validated on both the client and server side. You can do programmatic validation on the server side and throw a ValidationException and it will get turned into client side validation errors for the appropriate entities. And you can do async validation calls to the server side and affiliate the errors with the entities yourself through a simple API. In all cases, the error get all hooked up in the entity base class so that it ties in perfectly with the built-in validation mechanisms of Silverlight.

So come check it out, next Wednesday at 1000 PST:

http://www.silverlightshow.net/news/Webinar-WCF-RIA-Services-Validation.aspx

Friday, March 11, 2011 1:44:34 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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Only a few weeks left until DevConnections in Orlando, and I am really looking forward to the conference as always. This year I will be giving 4 sessions, 3 of which are Silverlight focused.

Here is my full lineup and a short breakdown of what I’ll be covering. If you can make it to the conference, which you should, I hope you track me down and say hi!

Learn to Behave — Extending the Power of XAML with Custom Behaviors
Behaviors are chunks of code you can write to add functionality to existing UI elements or to provide glue code between the XAML and code behind the scenes like view models in a loosely coupled way. This session will walk you through what a behavior is, how they are implemented, both as attached behaviors and leveraging the Blend SDK, and will also show you how to use some of the pre-built behaviors available in the Blend SDK and frameworks like Prism 4.

Tackle the Complexity of Async Calls in Silverlight and WPF clients
Whenever doing blocking tasks, particularly service calls in a Silverlight or WPF client, you will need to make those calls asynchronously. While async calls have been around for a long time in .NET, the patterns for addressing them have been changing and improving. This session will cover several common patterns for addressing async calls in client applications, including new and emerging approaches to async patterns including Reactive Extensions that let you treat asynchronous execution like a LINQ collection and the Task-based Async pattern and keywords coming for the C# and VB languages. This session will take the mystery and confusion out of what happens when and how to keep your code clean and safe in an inherently asynchronous client world.

Accelerate Silverlight Business App Development with WCF RIA Services
WCF RIA Services can add a lot of productivity for building data-intensive Silverlight business applications. It makes querying and updating simple, provides rich validation support, simple declarative security for the services and client, and rich error handling. In this session, you will get a quick intro into how to build Silverlight clients and services with RIA Services and see how quickly you can leverage these features so that you can just focus on the logic and appearance of your application instead of the plumbing. You'll see how to define domain services, query and update data, and apply declarative and imperative validation rules in the data pipeline. WCF RIA Services is no silver bullet, so you'll also learn about the limitations of the technology and where its sweet spot is for balancing productivity, performance, and scale.

And finally, not to be left out is good old Workflow 4:

Workflow Foundation 4: Should I Bother or Care?
Windows Workflow Foundation 4 is a complete rewrite of the workflow framework that first shipped in .NET 3.0. There have been a lot of improvements compared to the previous version,  but because of the rewrite, there are some not so nice portions of it too. The challenge with WF4 is deciding what it is good for, when to use it, and how to use it for some specific scenarios where it does make sense. This session will give a good overview of Workflow 4 as it exists in .NET, as well as a preview of some of the improvements that are coming in the next release. You’ll learn about the different kinds of workflow, what its capabilities are, some of the sweet spots where it can make a lot of sense to use it, as well as where it is not so great and you may want to stay away even if it looks like a good fit at a surface level.

Thursday, March 10, 2011 1:48:07 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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