BUILD Recap Materials

Last weekend I had the opportunity to present my view on the Build announcements at an offsite community event in Bulgaria. About 100 active community members joined the event to discuss latest and greatest from the Microsoft world. The event was fun, good opportunity to talk with people, have a drink (or two ) and shoot developers in a paint ball game

Build Recap

View more presentations from Emil Stoychev

Thanks to all who attended.

New SilverlightShow t-shirts!

Finally! We’ve been thinking about our new t-shirts since the last summer! We’ve been through a lot of creative ideas, discussing which is best, how to show our community dedication, etc. Our previous t-shirts were very well accepted – a lot of people couldn’t stop laughing for minutes after they realized what were our t-shirts about:

Excited for the new one? Here it is:

SO? What do you think? I’d like to know your opinion!

You want one for you? Follow SilverlightShow on Twitter and next week you might be one of the lucky winners to grab one of the very first t-shirts.

SilverlightShow now supports Silverlight User Groups

3.5 years ago we established SilverlightShow as a portal providing news, articles, events, webinars and anything related to the world of Silverlight. We also founded the Silverlight User Group in Bulgaria, which now amounts to 400+ members!
Since recently, me and the team at SilverlightShow have started working more closely with Silverlight User Groups worldwide, inviting them to collaborate on sharing content, and supporting them as much as we can. We offer to spread the word about user group events, share on SilverlightShow portal session recordings and materials, purchase books for the user group members (inviting the members to share their book reviews on SilverlightShow), send SilverlightShow SWAG and sponsor various other User Group initiatives. As a result of this collaboration with Seattle Silverlight User Group I am happy to be delivering a session on OData/WCF Data Services with Silverlight on March 2nd.
We are also discussing partnership with a huge User Group in the UK – NxtGen, the Phoenix User Group led by Dave Campbell and several others. We hope this collaboration will soon result in more members and more valuable UG meetups for those groups!
If your User Group would like to partner with us in any possible way – reach me with your ideas. You can also meet me at the MVP summit beginning of March or at MIX11 to discuss.

* User Group Icon by Jojo Mendoza

SilverlightShow now partners with SilverlightCream

We all know the SilverlightCream – it is been there since the first official days of Silverlight providing us with the best of the community almost daily (thanks Dave!). As both SilverlightShow and SilverlightCream are devoted to help the Silverlight community  we decided to share some information. I’m sure you follow both the Show and the Cream and sometimes you feel like bombarded with Silverlight news and articles. It is good that there is a lot of activity in the community, but it is hard to follow everything. That’s why now we provide best of SilverlightCream on SilverlightShow and vice versa – our weekly top 5 content on SilverlightCream.

But wait, there is more! Now we also sponsor misc SilverlightCream initiatives! We gave some t-shirts for Dave’s 1k blog post and we are ready to help him keep the good work for the future as well.

That’s just a small effort to keep the synergy in the community. If you feel like we can do something better please let us know.

SilverlightShow comes brand new in a month

I’m really excited on how are the things going with SilverlightShow. We started about 3.5 years ago and only for the last year we have 60%+ growth of the visits. We got some really valuable persons for the community on board like Cigdem Patlak (Crocus Girl), Gill Cleeren, Brian Noyes, Peter Kuhn and many others authoring articles, shooting videos, conducting free webinars. We also started a series of green contests that target Silverlight developers all over the world. We manage to get great prizes for the winners like MIX passes, cover travel and accommodation expenses, give Telerik licenses, etc. This is all great and it is thrilling to be part of this community.

One thing that I believe all of us are missing is Forums. We all know how important this is. We all need to ask questions, discuss on different topics with experienced guys, have someone solve our problems , etc. Guess what – we got forums in our new release! Curious how they would look like? Ok, let me share something:

(click for full image)

Looks nice, huh?

We got many new features to help you stay up to date, experience the site in an easier way, we organized all our content better, etc. Of course, you will judge whether you like it or not, but we tried as much as we can to provide you with a better experience. What else we got? I’ll keep that a secret for now

We will need some beta testers to ensure we meet your expectations. If you are willing to provide us with some help just drop me an email (estoychev at silverlightshow net) and I’ll include you in our list for early access.

Speaking at the Seattle Silverlight UG on March 2nd

The MVP Summit this year takes place at Bellevue and Redmond on February 28 – March 2 and as an MVP I decided to come by this time. It will be my first time there and I’ve only heard how cool it is, so I’m eagerly waiting to see it myself.

During that period there will be also a Seattle Silverlight UG meeting. Thanks to David Kelley, the UG lead, I’ll be presenting a session on OData/WCF Data Services with Silverlight on March 2nd. I’ll cover the basics of the OData protocol, the WCF Data Services client for Silverlight, some key line-of-business scenarios like lazy loading, dynamic queries, filtering/sorting/grouping etc.

Here is the preliminary agenda:

1. OData, WCF Data Services
• What is WCF?
• What is WCF Data Services? OData?
• Service architecture
2. Working with data
• Querying data
• Hierarchical data
• Filtering, grouping, sorting, paging
• Lazy Loading
• CRUD
• Tracking Changes

The session level will be intermediate (200 according to Microsoft leveling) with drill down to specific topics.

SilverlightShow will be giving some swag so be there if you want to be among the first to get the new SilverlightShow t-shirt

As I understand from David, usually there are many Microsoft MVPs and employees on these UG meetings, so I believe there will be a lot of fun

Meet you there!

Seattle Silverlight UG pages:

Official UG site: http://seattlesilverlight.net
Twitter: http://twitter.com/SeattleSlug
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Seattle-SLUG/181750441443

SilverlightShow’s bookshelf soon to be available as open source on CodePlex

Year and a half ago we published a Silverlight bookshelf control on SilverlightShow. We got a lot of positive feedback from the community, a lot of people wanted to use it on their web sites too. I consider that a success, because it really shows a very simple and natural way for browsing through books – just like you would do in the library. We also optimized our control for search engines so every shelf and book has its own URL. For example all books related to Windows Phone 7 are available at http://www.silverlightshow.net/Books/WindowsPhone7.aspx.  Opening this URL will open the control and scroll to the shelf that contains the Windows Phone 7 books. If you like a specific book and want to share it with a friend you can do it - http://www.silverlightshow.net/book/Silverlight-4-Unleashed.aspx – this will open the Silverlight 4 Unleashed book by Laurent Bugnion.

By now we weren’t able to let you use this control on your web site, but we plan to do so very soon. We already developed the bookshelf as a Silverlight control. While this control can be used for showcasing books it is not limited to – it can also be used in many other scenarios. Think of it as a cabinet for storing miscellaneous items – any kind of products – cars, cameras, phones, etc. Actually, it is not just a cabinet – it is a classified cabinet. Just like in the bookshelf all books are placed on different shelves depending on the category, any items in the cabinet can be classified – for example if you use cars you can classify them by car producer.

We are just a few weeks away from releasing the whole source code on CodePlex along with couple of integration scenarios. Stay tuned as I’ll post more info on the control soon.

Gotchas on migrating your web app (ASP.NET, WCF, Silverlight), database and SMTP to Windows Azure

Cloud computing became a buzz word last 2 years and while I haven’t ever played with any “clouds” (excluding hosting media on Amazon S3 for SilverlightShow) I needed to deploy a web app to Windows Azure. The application itself consist of ASP.NET Web Application, couple of WCF services (including WCF Data Service) and a Silverlight application. The application is also using an SMTP server to send some reports on daily basis.

My case is pretty common and I was lucky enough to find all the information I needed on the web so I thought I will summarize all blogs I read to get my application up and running on the cloud.

First Gotcha: How to migrate your existing ASP.NET app to run on Windows Azure?

So here you are having a regular ASP.NET app that has to be published on Azure. What do you do? That’s an easy one! There are templates for Visual Studio that let you add a Windows Azure Cloud Service to your solution and then add an existing web project to it. Jim Nakashima has a wonderful blog on Windows Azure. In one of his posts his explains the whole process of migrating your existing ASP.NET to Windows Azure – read on.

Second Gotcha: How to connect your domain to Windows Azure?

Usually, when you host your application on the web and you have a domain name for it, you only need to set your nameservers to connect the domain to the hosting. I expected that to be true for Windows Azure, but unfortunately there is no such option. Instead there is a workaround where you need to first add a CNAME record in your domain like www.yourdomain.com and then add a forwarding from www to the friendly DNS of your Windows Azure app (yourapp.cloudapp.net). The process is well described by Steve Marx on his blog.

Third Gotcha: How to run a “scheduled task”?

In my case, I had to run a SQL query, collect some reports and send them to couple of emails on a daily basis. My first thought was to do it with a job in the SQL Agent. For some reason that’s not currently supported, so I contacted my fellow Anton Staykov, the leader of the local Azure group, and he pointed me to couple of blog posts on using the Worker Role in Azure:

I Miss You SQL Server Agent: Part 1

I Miss You SQL Server Agent: Part 2

I Miss You SQL Server Agent: Part 3

It turns out it is pretty easy to schedule a job this way and it is actually much easier than using a SQL Server Agent.

These gotchas did a good job for me for starting with Azure. Hope they will do some goodness for you too.

How to Build Composite Applications with Prism for Silverlight

Today I gave a talk on Prism and Silverlight at the DevReach conference. Here are my slides and the demo I used in my presentation. Hopefully they would help you start building composite applications with Prism.

Download: How to Build Composite Applications with Prism for Silverlight – slides and demo

Book review: Microsoft Silverlight 4 Business Application Development

Microsoft Silverlight 4 Business Application Development by Cameron Albert and Frank La Vigne

As the authors Frank LaVigne and Cameron Albert say this beginner’s guide in Silverlight 4 Business Application Development walks you through the wow factors of creating interactive RIAs and quickly start building business applications. The examples in the book are structured in a clear step by step manner, making you eager to start exploring the features right away. After the brief “Time for action” instructions there is a great “What just happened?” section which makes an overall look at the described feature and will certainly give you ideas for your own work.

The travel begins with a brief introduction into the Silverlight language – the power of XAML to create rich experience with hardly any procedural code, how easy and graceful it is to bring sound in your applications and the great tools a developer must have in the top drawer of his bad time cabinet. Deep Zoom brings you a whole new world of perceptions assuring a smooth user experience while exploring terabytes of images. You’ll surely be happy to write your first and surely not the last “I love ink” application. The book dives deep into the Bing Maps API – from simple mapping to enhanced route planning and geocoding. It further explores in great details the WCF services, how to create custom controls and data validation in a real time created business application example project. This project is later expanded with the ADO.NET Entity Framework model and WCF RIA Services, showing the reader how to customize data and deliver the business application in a variety of forms. The real time business application examples really make the best there is to guide you through the many features which Silverlight gives us.