Latest News from Brad Abrams

Business Apps with Silverlight 4, RIA Services & Visual Studio 2010

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:30:00 EST

I had a great time at PDC2009 talk, but I was disappointed that I could not demo in both C# and VB… So here is the next best thing: A full play-by-play of the demo, but all in VB! Enjoy. I am starting off with the new Business Application Template that gets installed with RIA Services. For this demo, I am going to used a customized version of the template.

Silverlight and RIA Services: Implementing Search

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:11:51 EST

Some of you likely noticed that my PDC09 demo included a stubbed out Search

RIA Services: A DomainService Is a WCF Service – Add Service Reference

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:30:00 EST

I made the fairly bold statement at my PDC09 talk that a DomainService IS A WCF Service. That is, everything you know about a WCF service should be true of a DomainService. I didn’t have time to get into this in my talk, so I thought I’d hit the highlights here. And in the process show how to consume a DomainService from a WinForms. You can also see more examples at: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/RiaServices

Building Amazing Business Apps with Silverlight 4, & Visual Studio 2010

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:45:00 EST

I had a great time at my talk today at PDC2009. I was able to spend much of the time in a demo… Here is a summary of that demo so you can walk through it on your own machine:

Welcome to WCF RIA Services Beta!

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:57:43 EST

Today at PDC09, Scott Guthrie Announced the beta of WCF RIA Services. As you may know RIA Services is a set of end-to-end experiences that makes it as easy

http://silverlight.net/riaservices/ is Live!

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 21:03:03 EST

We have been working for a while to get a community site together where we can aggregate all the great buzz, resources and discussions about .NET RIA Services. We hope you enjoy the content we already have up there and help us get more

We Need Your Feedback on the Documentation

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:49:25 EDT

Lightweight Linq Parser

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:28:30 EDT

Jason Allor, dev manager for my team, recently posted about a cool lightweight LINQ parser. The idea was to make it much

Index for Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:46:00 EDT

Thanks to all of you who asked… I had to take a sick day today, so this was nice mindless work to get done. Hope you enjoy it!

Mozilla and Microsoft work together on WPF\ClickOnce plugins

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:01:47 EDT

RIA Services Blog Posts – Now in French!

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 01:21:44 EDT

PDC 2009 – I can’t wait!

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:01:08 EDT

Things are really starting to heat up around here as we get ready for the PDC. Just this week I have talked to folks on Silverlight, Visual Studio, Azure, ASP.NET, .NET RIA Services, MEF that all have very cool new stuff to talk about at

Video Posted for Belgium Visual Studio User’s Group: 10 Years of Framework Design Guidelines

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 20:34:00 EDT

As a nice follow up from my Belgium Visual Studio User’s Group: 10 Years of Framework Design Guidelines talk,

Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 26: Authentication and Personalization

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 20:04:34 EDT

The data we work with in business application is valuable. We need to protect the data.. sometimes by keeping up with exactly who accesses and updates what data when and other times we need to actively prevent data from being accessed expected

Portugal ReMix Silverlight 3 and .NET RIA Services

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 10:51:51 EDT

ReMix in Lisban, Portugal was a fabulous was to end my ReMix tour. They keynote (as much as I could understand of it) was a lot of fun. They did the read more

Belgium ReMix and Architect Forum: 10 Years of Framework Design Guidelines

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 12:00:00 EDT

I had a great time at ReMix and the Architect Forum in Belgium. I had a chance to cover build an application end-to-end with Silverlight 3 and RIA Services which was basically this application. At the Architect Forum I had a chance to talk in more depth about the general application pattern we are thinking about for RIA applications. I shamelessly stole some slides from Nikhil Kothari for this one. Check out the slides.

Austria ReMix Silverlight 3 and .NET RIA Services

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 10:10:03 EDT

ReMix in Vienna, Austria was really great. The attendees were very engaged and the venue was quite nice.

Simon Guest gave

Helsinki ReMix Silverlight 3 and .NET RIA Services

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 07:37:10 EDT

I had a great time at ReMix in Helsinki. read more

Belgium Visual Studio User’s Group: 10 Years of Framework Design Guidelines

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 16:15:03 EDT

I had a great time at the the Belgium Visual Studio User’s Group meeting. The turn out was excellent. Thanks especially to Gill

HanselMinutes Interview on RIA Services

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 12:18:00 EDT

I had a great opportunity to chat with the famous Scott Hanselman recently on .NET RIA Services. We drilled a lot into the background for RIA Services and what the high level patterns we are addressing with RIA Services.

Silverlight 3 Navigation

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 17:30:00 EDT

I got a lot of great feedback on my post Silverlight 3 Navigation: Dynamically Loaded Pages… Now MEF Powered! Dinesh Chandnani decided to do an update to this sample after looking at the feedback and talking to Nikhil Kothari and Wes Haggard from the MEF dev team. The goals for this update are:

Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 25: ViewModel

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 21:22:59 EDT

ViewModel (or Model-View-ViewModel) is an emerging pattern in the WPF, Silverlight space which enables a separation of

Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Comments about Adding…

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 22:35:08 EDT

A couple of people mentioned they are having problems getting adding to work in my

Western European ReMix Tour 2009

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 10:20:52 EDT

I was lucky enough to be asked to go on a brief western European ReMix tour. Our goal with these events is to bring the best of Mix 09 (and some new stuff) closer to where some of the best developers and

Silverlight 3 Navigation Application: New Themes and Tweaks

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 22:33:04 EDT

Corrina, head UX-designer for Silverlight, just posted some cool new themes for the Silverlight 3 Navigation Application

Silverlight 3 Jumpstart Book

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 23:04:05 EDT

David Yack dropped by my office today and we had a good chat about the direction of Silverlight and RIA Services. David has some great feedback for us from several real apps he has been working on.&

Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 24: Stored Procedures

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 15:40:04 EDT

Still updating my Mix 09 Silverlight 3 + RIA Services talk with more fun stuff. While many of the RIA Services examples we have shown thus far do CRUD directly against database tables, I certainly recognize that many scenarios

Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 23: Azure

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:10:24 EDT

Still updating my Mix 09 Silverlight 3 + RIA Services talk with more fun stuff. Azure represents a general trend in the industry towards a cloud computing model. As much as I love the development phase of projects, the operations

.NET RIA Services: Separate Solution Files

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:00:00 EDT

Still updating my Mix 09 Silverlight 3 + RIA Services talk with more fun stuff. This time I take up a challenge from Mr. Wildermuth. Shawn recently raised a very interesting issue with RIA Services

Hierarchical Data

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:10:00 EDT

Wow – the gift that keeps giving.. I am *still* having fun updating my my simple Mix 09 Business Application demo. Would anyone be interested in a say 10 hour session at PDC2009 where we walk thought all of this stuff ;-). Anyway, in this section I want to take up a challenge that Ben Hayat sent me to show that Silverlight and RIA Services are really capable of building real business applications.

Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services wirth NHibernate

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:15:00 EDT

I am having a blast with the series where I am updating my simple Mix 09 Business Application demo. In this part, I wanted to explore one of the most popular data access solution for .NET – NHibernate. Many customers finds that the flexibility of NHibernate makes it easier for them to build maintainable and testable applications. As an aside, I think NHibernate is an excellent example of the vibrant open source community on .NET that I’d like to support.

ASP.NET Dynamic Data

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 20:15:00 EDT

Still have good fun updating my simple Mix 09 Business Application demo. In this part, I wanted to consider how we might build the admin site of our site.. Because it is just for a very small number of trusted users, I’d like to get something up and running quickly. I’d also like to share all by business logic and validation code between the Silverlight client and the WebAdmin site. You can see the full series here.

Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services: Part 18

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 17:00:00 EDT

Continuing in our discussion of Silverlight 3 and the update to .NET RIA Services. I have been updating the example from my Mix09 talk “building business applications with Silverlight 3”. RIA Services is very much an extension of the LINQ project. Effectively you can think of RIA Services as n-tier LINQ. As such, I thought it would be interesting to show how any of the tons of Linq Providers can be used with RIA Services.

Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 17: Evolving an Application

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 16:50:00 EDT

Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update Summary

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 18:11:58 EDT

This series on updating my Mix09 talk to current bits has sort of taken on a life of its own and I am not quite through,

Exposing a WCF Service in Silverlight

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 08:00:00 EDT

I am having a blast with the series where I am updating my simple Mix 09 Business Application demo. In this part, I wanted to consider the scenario that I hope is a common one. The developer writes their Silverlight app using the RIA Services pattern and the application becomes wildly successful. So successful in fact there is a demand to put a services head on top of the same application logic to facilitate writing a bunch of other clients. This is the sort of pattern we see happening with applications like Twitter and Sharepoint.

Silverlight 3 Navigation: Dynamically Loaded Pages… Now MEF Powered!

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 18:28:00 EDT

Recently David Poll posted a very cool technique for navigating to dynamically loaded pages and on

LIDNUG: Silverlight Ready for Business and .NET RIA Services Presentation – Demo Posted

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 01:12:49 EDT

I had a great time at the LinkedIn Users’ Group meeting… the only down side is that I missed the really bad pizza’s that most User’s Groups offer ;-)

Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 15: ASP.NET MVC

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 12:00:00 EDT

Continuing in our discussion of Silverlight 3 and the update to .NET RIA Services. I have been updating the example from my Mix09 talk read more

Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 14: Visual Basic (VB) and WPF Support

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 11:37:00 EDT

A few folks commented that they’d like to see something in my series updating my Mix09 talk read more

Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services: Part 12

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 10:45:00 EDT

More from my Mix09 talk “building business applications with Silverlight 3”. Many customers have told me that they love Entity Framework and LinqToSql, but that they are not always able to use them in their projects just yet. In fact the number of folks that are using ADO.NET DataSet, DataReader, etc. is very high.

Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 13: The New Class Library Project

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 10:08:00 EDT

Well… this has been one of the longer blog series I have done, but there is so much meat here! Maybe someone will write a book or two? Anyway, in this post, I wanted to spend a little time looking at the project structure we have been

Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 11: The Client-Only World

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 11:25:00 EDT

I have had a great time so far with this series.. I hope you have gotten something out of it as well. Some readers have asked me if RIA Services is required for the client validation goodness. Nope, the .NET RIA Services bits

Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 10: LinqToSql

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 11:25:00 EDT

Continuing in our discussion of Silverlight 3 and the update to .NET RIA Services. I have been updating the example from my Mix09 talk read more

Business Apps for Silverlight 3 RTM: POCO and Authentication Provider

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 09:30:00 EDT

I have gotten lots of good comments on my series updating my Mix09 talk read more

Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM - Part 7

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 08:45:00 EDT

I wanted to continue with the enhancements to my Mix09 talk “building business applications with Silverlight 3”. In this section I am going to show how to get data from a REST based web services rather than directly using Entity Framework or Linq to Sql. Let’s focus on the cloud source of data. We will use the same sample from the previous parts and change only the data access part to go against ADO.NET Data Services as the data store.

Science Fiction Book Review: Accelerando by Charles Stross

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:33:15 EDT

Silverlight Ready for Business and .NET RIA Services Presentation

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 12:15:00 EDT

On July 30th @ 8pm I will be doing a virtual talk at the Linked .NET User’s Group. I encourage you to come and bring your questions on Silverlight 3 and .NET RIA Services.. Brad Abrams - Silverlight ready for business and .Net RIA Services - Thursday July 30, 2009, 8:00PM PDT - Register: http://events.linkedin.com/LIDNUG-Brad-Abrams-Silverlight-ready/pub/77847

Simple Example of Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) in Silverlight

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 11:17:00 EDT

As you may have heard, we recently shipped MEF support of Silverlight in our CodePlex drop<

Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 13:45:00 EDT

In the original demo I showed getting your data from a database directly from the web tier. Many enterprise customers have found that it their systems are more maintainable and secure if they isolate the database access behind a set of web services possibly in a DMZ. This means that no apps talk directly to the database. Yet there is often a need to add application specific validation and application logic as well as data shaping and aggregation in the web-tier. To show this, I have refactored the example application from the first part of this walk through to access its data from a WCF service rather than EF directly. Notice that all the other UI bits stayed the same,