Software Rockstar

Last night I was at Dallas .NET User Group meeting where Tony Sneed of DevelopMentor made a presentation on WCF RIA Services called “Turbocharge Silverlight Development with WCF RIA Services“. I had read about this new technology before, but never had the time to play with it.

The presentation turned out to be pretty cool. I think WCF RIA Services provides a very neat way to design n-tier apps without much hassle as it takes care of much of the heavy lifting for you providing very easy data validation, authentication, and role-based security amongst other awesomeness.  Also through code projection it automatically allows shared code between UI and the service tier, which makes it easy to write code once and use it cross-tier.  While WCF RIA Services can be used with any front-end, e.g. WinForms and ASP.NET, it really shines when combined with a Silverlight front-end.  The best part of the technology is automatic batch updates, which is really neat.

Download and Install

1. Install WCF RIA Services for Silverlight 4
   • Install WCF RIA Services for Silverlight 4 and Visual Studio 2010
   • Install the WCF RIA Services Toolkit
   • If you already have the Silverlight 4 Tools and Visual Studio 2010 installed you can download WCF RIA Services V1.0 directly
2. Install WCF RIA Services SP1 Beta for Silverlight 4
   • Install WCF RIA Services SP1 Beta for Silverlight 4 and Visual Studio 2010
   • Install the WCF RIA Services December 2010 Toolkit for WCF RIA Services SP1 Beta

While working on creating an application framework for a personal project, I needed a way to expose a Dictionary<TKey, TValue> object from one of my methods. The only caveat being, I wanted the Dictionary object to be read-only. Read more…

Finally a new version of SubSonic was released today with a lot of new features.  SubSonic is one of my favorite Data Access Layer (DAL) generators, that makes it super easy to create data access code.

As a developer you have a lot of control over what the generated code looks like, which is great because I do not like code generators to dictate the essence of my code.  But the beauty of SubSonic is that you never really have to interact with the generated code itself.  It’s automatically generated and compiled for you — you just need to learn how to use it, which is pretty simple.  What’s more, it’s free, and works with not only SQL Server, but also with MySQL, SQLite, and Oracle databases.  Read more…

ScottGu  just made available a free downloadable eBook in PDF format as well as a simple and easy-to-understand sample project called Nerddinner.

The eBook is actually a chapter from his upcoming book on MVC, but it is an end-to-end tutorial that walks through building a small but complete ASP.NET MVC application from scratch.

Download eBook.

Download Nerddinner sample code.

Buy ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Book at Amazon.com. 

If you do decide to read this book, please do not forget to share your thoughts with me.