Silverlight & WCF RIA Services

I’ve experienced several problems and I have to take a closer look on OOB, how it works and how we can for example install our silverlight application from CD.

Out of Browser is a feature of Silverlight 3+ Applications, where the user can install the application to the desktop and you as a developer can provide more functionality, especially when application is installed as trusted.

If you want to explore where the OOB applications are located in users hard drive, how they are launched and how to allow the user to install Silverlight Application from CD, continue reading. Continue reading »

Patterns&Practices team released the second version of .NET Application Architecture Guide, which provides guidance for architecture principles, design principles and trusted patterns.

It helps developers and architects to build more effective, high quality .NET applications.

It is also a good overview of software architecture for students.

Read .NET Application Architecture Guide PDF (on MSDN)

Book cover

Unit testing has become rather important in the last decade as the need for quality code increased. It is also an essential part of Test-Driven Design which is a part of Extreme Programming.

Probably the most common approach to do unit testing in .NET solutions is by creating special Tests projects in a pair to the library we want to test and perform the testing in NUnit . In Silverlight projects we would like to test the business domain logic on the server and the ViewModel classes on the Silverlight client side.

If you haven’t ever used unit testing read an excellent book The Art of Unit Testing with examples in C# which will guide through both the theory of unit testing and practical examples. There were also a presentation of Developing Testable Silverlight Application at the Microsoft PDC conference.

Note: I plan to enlarge this article later with a real example of Testable Silverlight Application.

Domain model is a pattern for an object-oriented approach for organizing business logic.
Let me introduce you 2 books which deal with this pattern, previously briefly described in the P of EAA book written by Martin Fowler.

Domain-driven design

Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software

The book offers readers a systematic approach to domain-driven design, presenting an extensive set of design best practices, experience-based techniques, and fundamental principles that facilitate the development of software projects facing complex domains. Intertwining design and development practice, this book incorporates numerous examples based on actual projects to illustrate the application of domain-driven design to real-world software development.

from the back cover

Applying DDD

Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns: With Examples in C# and .NET

Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns is the first complete, practical guide to leveraging patterns, domain-driven design, and test-driven development in .NET environments. Drawing on seminal work by Martin Fowler and Eric Evans, Jimmy Nilsson shows how to customize real-world architectures for any .NET application. You’ll learn how to prepare domain models for application infrastructure; support business rules; provide persistence support; plan for the presentation layer and UI testing; and design for service orientation or aspect orientation.

description of the book at Amazon

I’m subscribed to a few blogs which are really good sources of samples, articles and news about our topic.
Scan my list to see if you would find useful resources there, too.

Brad Abrams blog – Design Guidelines, Managed code and the .NET Framework (RIA Services articles)

Tim Heuer blog – My favourite source for most up-to-date Silverlight articles (RIA Services articles)

Laurent Duveau – Really a lot of examples of new Silverlight features

Jeff Prosise blog – Well written blog mainly about Silverlight

Shawn Wildermuth – Professional articles about architecture & patterns, MEF, MVVM

SilverlightShow.net – Although it’s not a pure blog, it is an ultimate source of the most important articles.

If you know about another useful blog not mentioned here let me know…

I created a new facebook group WCF RIA Services because I haven’t found any other group specially discussing Silverlight, RIA Applications, etc.
So if you are an Experienced Microsoft .NET developer interested in RIA and Enterprise applications feel free to join our facebook group and share your news and knowledge with others.

P EAA book

Development of Enterprise applications is not an easy process and there are a lot of problems you have to cope with. Martin Fowler, consultant on the design of enterprise software, has written a book clarifying architectural patterns, domain modeling, OOP programming and other patterns.

A short summary of EAA patterns can be found in his catalog.

Continue reading »

MIX '09 logo

I’ve found a lot of useful videos about Rich Internet Application, Silverlight and .NET RIA Services.

Visit MIX 09 web site to see all videos related to Microsoft Technologies or continue reading and watch my recommended webcasts.

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