Latest News from Brad Abrams

My Last Day at Microsoft

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 13:51:40 EDT

Wow – I can’t believe it has already been 13 years at Microsoft. I have had a great time here and learned so much from the smart and passionate people I work with as well as the incredible developer community around .NET. But I have

My Last Day at Microsoft

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 13:51:40 EDT

My Last Day at Microsoft

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 13:51:40 EDT

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Ajax Endpoint

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 12:13:00 EDT

Continuing in our series, I wanted to touch on how a RIA Services can be exposed your service in read more

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Ajax Endpoint

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 12:13:00 EDT

Continuing in our series, I wanted to touch on how a RIA Services can be exposed your service in read more

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Ajax Endpoint

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 12:13:00 EDT

Continuing in our series, I wanted to touch on how a RIA Services can be exposed your service in read more

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Exposing WCF (SOAP\WSDL) Services

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 12:31:00 EDT

Continuing in our

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Exposing WCF (SOAP\WSDL) Services

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 12:31:00 EDT

Continuing in our

Silverlight 4 + RIA: Exposing WCF (SOAP\WSDL) Services

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 12:31:00 EDT

I wanted to touch on how a RIA Services can be exposed as a Soap\WSDL service. This is very useful if you want to enable the exact same business logic\data access logic is available to clients other than Silverlight. For example to a WinForms application or WPF or even a console application. SOAP is a particularly good model for interop with the Java\JEE world as well. First you need to add a reference to Microsoft.ServiceModel.DomainSerivves.Hosting.EndPoints assembly from the RIA Services toolkit.

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Authentication and Personalization

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 10:32:00 EDT

To continue our series, In real business applications our data is often very valuable and

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Authentication and Personalization

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 10:32:00 EDT

To continue our series, In real business applications our data is often very valuable and

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Authentication and Personalization

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 10:32:00 EDT

To continue our series, In real business applications our data is often very valuable and

Great Presentation to the Israel Dot Net Developers User Group

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 12:45:00 EDT

I continue to be impressed with the quality of .NET Developers in Israel.. we had a full house last night for a 2+ hour presentation on building business applications with Silverlight and RIA Services. The audience was very engaged and had lots of good, relevant questions which created a really good conversation. Check out the slides and demo. I started off by demoing the Right-to-Left text support for Hebrew that is baked in as part of Silverlight 4.

Great Presentation to the Israel Dot Net Developers User Group (IDNDUG)

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 01:01:22 EDT

Great Presentation to the Israel Dot Net Developers User Group (IDNDUG)

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 01:01:22 EDT

Program Manager (PM) Tip Index

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 01:53:00 EDT

I thought it would be worthwhile to produce an index for the (very) occasional series I have on giving tips to PMs at Microsoft.

Program Manager (PM) Tip Index

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 01:53:00 EDT

I thought it would be worthwhile to produce an index for the (very) occasional series I have on giving tips to PMs at Microsoft.

Program Manager (PM) Tip Index

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 01:53:00 EDT

I thought it would be worthwhile to produce an index for the (very) occasional series I have on giving tips to PMs at Microsoft.

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Validating Data

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 13:38:00 EDT

To continue our series let’s look at data validation our business applications. Updating data is great, but when you

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Validating Data

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 13:38:00 EDT

To continue our series let’s look at data validation our business applications. Updating data is great, but when you

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Validating Data

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 13:38:00 EDT

To continue our series let’s look at data validation our business applications. Updating data is great, but when you enable data update you often need to check the data to ensure it is valid. RIA Services as clean, prescriptive pattern for handling this. First let’s look at what you get for free. The value for any field entered has to be valid for the range of that data type. For example, you never need to write code to ensure someone didn’t type is “forty-two” into a textbox bound to an int field. You also get nice looking and well behaved validation exposure in the UI.

A Great Time at Developer Academy 4 In Israel

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 08:35:31 EDT

A Great Time at Developer Academy 4 In Israel

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 08:35:00 EDT

A Great Time at Developer Academy 4 In Israel

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 08:35:00 EDT

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Localizing Business Application

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 08:32:00 EDT

To continue our series, let’s look at localizing our business applications. In today’s global village, it is often no longer OK

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Localizing Business Application

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 08:32:00 EDT

To continue our series, let’s look at localizing our business applications. In today’s global village, it is often no longer OK

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Localizing Business Application

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 08:32:00 EDT

To continue our series, let’s look at localizing our business applications. In today’s global village, it is often no longer OK

Mix2010: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Microsoft Silverlight

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 16:02:00 EDT

I had a great time today in my Mix2010 session on SEO for Silverlight.

Update: You can watch the video here:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Microsoft Silverlight

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 16:02:00 EDT

I had a great time today in my Mix2010 session on SEO for Silverlight. You can find all the slides (more than I was able to cover in the talk) here. and the the full play-by-play of the demo (include a link to the completed solution). I started off talking why SEO matters. You can view the site live by using Bing for “my foodie Explorer Cooking Class with Joe..” or the other guys search engine equally well. ;-)

Mix2010: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Microsoft Silverlight

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 16:02:00 EDT

I had a great time today in my Mix2010 session on SEO for Silverlight.

Update: You can watch the video here:

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:45:00 EDT

To continue our series, let’s look at SEO and Silverlight. The vast majority of web traffic is driven by search. Search engines are the first stop for many users on the public internet and is increasingly so in corporate environments as well. Search is also the key technology that drives most ad revenue. So needless to say, SEO is important. But how does SEO work in a Silverlight application where most of the interesting content is dynamically generated? I will present an application pattern for doing SEO in a Silverlight with the minimum of extra work. There are three fun-and-easy steps to making your Silverlight application SEO friendly. Let’s drill into each of these areas by walk through an example. I am going to use my PDC2009 demo “foodie Explorer” as a base line. You might consider reading my previous walk through (PDC09 Talk: Building Amazing Business Applications with Silverlight 4, RIA Services and Visual Studio 2010) to get some background before we begin.

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:45:00 EDT

To continue our series, let’s look at SEO and Silverlight. The vast majority of web traffic is driven by search. Search engines

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:45:00 EDT

To continue our series, let’s look at SEO and Silverlight. The vast majority of web traffic is driven by search. Search engines

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services: Updating Data in the Client

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:38:00 EDT

To continue our series, let’s look at updating the data. I have created a Plates.xaml page with very similar structure to the above. For details on how I created this page, check out my PDC 09 demo walk through. Now let’s look at updating the Plate data.. First we will create some default “form” UI by dragging an entity from the datasources window in much the same way we did above. But before we create the UI, notice the order of the fields – it matches the order they will be generated in the UI. They are in alphabetic order, but that is not always what you want. For example, I think Name should be first.

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services: Ready for Business: Updating Data in the Client

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:38:00 EDT

To continue our series, let’s look at updating the data. I have created a Plates.xaml page with very similar structure

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services: Ready for Business: Updating Data in the Client

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:38:00 EDT

To continue our series, let’s look at updating the data. I have created a Plates.xaml page with very similar structure

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Exposing OData Services

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:14:00 EDT

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Exposing OData Services

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:14:00 EDT

OData is an emerging set of extensions for the ATOM protocol that

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Exposing OData Services

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:14:00 EDT

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Consuming Data in the Silverlight Client

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:50:00 EDT

To continue our series, let’s see where the fun comes in my look at how easy that is to consume from the client. First

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Consuming Data in the Silverlight Client

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:50:00 EDT

To continue our series, let’s see where the fun comes in my look at how easy that is to consume from the client. First

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Consuming Data in the Silverlight Client

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:50:00 EDT

To continue our series, let’s see where the fun comes in my look at how easy that is to consume from the client. First

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Exposing Data from Entity Framework

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:46:00 EDT

To continue our series

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Exposing Data from Entity Framework

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:46:00 EDT

To continue our series

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services: Exposing Data from Entity Framework

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:46:00 EDT

To continue our series I wanted to look next at how to expose your data from the server side of your application. The interesting data in your business applications come from a wide variety of data sources. From a SQL Database, from Oracle DB, from Sql Azure, from Sharepoint, from a mainframe and you have likely already chosen a datamodel such as NHibernate, Linq2Sql, Entity Framework, Stored Proc, a service. The goal of RIA Service in this release is to make it easy to work with data from any (or many) of the sources in a seamless way from a Silverlight application. This walk through will use Entity Framework accessing the Sql Express database, but the basic concept applies to any data source. Add DishView.mdf to BusinessApplication1.Web\App_Data – Of course in a real world example, you’d just have a connection string to an existing database. Then create an Entity Framework model on top of it.

Silverlight 4 + RIA: Starting a New Project with the Business App Template

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:45:00 EDT

To kick off our series, I wanted to focus on our goal of helping you focus on your business, not plumbing code. The first place you will see this in the pre-build components in the Business Application Template. It describes a prescriptive application structure, looks great and is easily customizable. After you have successfully installed Silverlight 4 for developers (which includes RIA Services) you will have a couple of new projects in the Silverlight section. We are going to focus on the Business Application Template. Notice this creates a single solution with two projects. BusinessApplication1 is the client part of the application and BusinessApplication2 is the server part. These are related projects that know about each other.

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Starting a New Project with the Business Application Template

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:45:00 EDT

To kick off our series, I wanted to focus on our goal of helping you focus on your business, not plumbing code. The

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Starting a New Project with the Business Application Template

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:45:00 EDT

To kick off our series, I wanted to focus on our goal of helping you focus on your business, not plumbing code. The

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Index

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 18:24:00 EDT

With Silverlight 4 and RIA Services all but done, I thought it would be worthwhile to highlight some of the key features of the platform and tools that make Silverlight a fantastic platform for building business applications. I’ll avoid gratuitous video and dancing hippos and focus on just the bread and butter of business applications: Querying, Updating, Validating and securing your important business-data. I’ll also use this to refresh a few of the posts from my Silverlight 3 era series.

Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Index

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 18:24:00 EDT

With Silverlight 4 and read more