Another talk, another blog post.  As you can see, my blog posts are like my babies… in the fact that they apparently take 9 months to make.  I’ll see if I can’t speed things up next time, but we’ll see.

For all of you who came to MIX, and those who are just interested in what Silverlight 4 has done for business applications, below is the content from my MIX talk. 

The talk was a lot of fun, and my apologies to anyone who got turned away at the door because the room was packed.

Recording

You can find a recording of the talk here: http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/CL08 

Downloads

For those of you who want to follow along at home, here are the files for the demos that I showed in my presentation.

What you’ll need

All demos were done using the free MIX10 Silverlight 4 RC bits and accompanying tools:

These include

The installation instructions for all of the above and other SL4 tools can be found here: http://silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-4/

Project

You can download the samples and snippets here: http://cid-e7a27f7920b66c3f.office.live.com/self.aspx/Downloads/MIX10%5E_CL08.zip?lc=1033 http://drop.io/MIX10CL08/asset/mix10-cl08-zip

Notes

Building and Running Either the Final or Start Project

  1. If you are getting a “Visual Studio Project Sample Loading Error” it is because you need to unblock the zip file.  Directions on how to do that can be found here
  2. The dlls for any broken References can be found in the Project’s Lib directory
  3. There are a few known issues that you might run into that have been fixed in later bits

Recreating the Project From the Start Folder

  1. If your DataSources window is empty, try building
  2. The Toolkit dlls are included to allow the sample to run and shouldn’t be used outside of the sample.  The fully supported dlls will be shipping in the next Toolkit drop which ships alongside Silverlight 4 RTW.
  3. The designer files for the Toolkit were not included in the project, so the Charting section is likely to not work as smoothly as in the video.  As mentioned when the supported Toolkit is used such issues will not be present.

Slides

You can download the slides here

 

What we covered:

We covered an huge amount of content but we still didn’t even cover all of the new features for LOB in Silverlight 4.

Displaying data

  • WCF .NET RIA Services
  • Data Sources Window
  • DataGrid Column Editor
  • Binding enhancements
  • DataGrid enhancements
  • DataForm
  • Sorting
  • Grouping
  • Charts

Professional look and feel

  • ICommand
  • Right-Click
  • Context Menu *
  • Implicit Styles
  • Theme switching *
  • Mouse wheel support in list controls

Getting user input

  • Webcam
  • Drag & Drop

Validating user input

  • INotifyDataErrorInfo
  • Cross-field Validation
  • Async Validation

Saving data and sharing it

  • Clipboard
  • Printing

* Coming in the next drop of the Toolkit