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Speaking at NNUG Kristiansand and Smidig 2009 next week

Jonas Folles — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 08:45:55 GMT

On Wednesday 21 October I will be visiting the Kristiansand chapter of NNUG to give two Silverlight presentations. The first will be about the MVVM design pattern, and the second on building business focused applications using .NET RIA Services. After the NNUG meeting there will be a geekbeer get-together at Patrick’s. Details and registration for the meeting is up on the NNUG site.

On Thursday and Friday (22-23 October) I will be attending the Smidig 2009 (Agile 2009) conference in Oslo. This will be my first time attending the Smidig conference, and I’m really looking forward to it. The format of the conference is 4 lightning talks pr hour before lunch, and open spaces after lunch. Judging by the number of submitted talks I think it is going to be a really interesting conference, and I hope to learn allot about how to run successful agile software projects. I’m also a big fan of open spaces and the interaction between conference attendees it enables.

Since I was planning to attend the conference I made a last minute decision to submit a talk on UX prototyping in agile projects using Balsamiq and SketchFlow. The talk got accepted, which means I will not only be attending – I will also be speaking at the conference!

I’m looking forward to doing some presentations again, and I hope to see you in Kristiansand or Oslo next week!

(Time-lapse video taken by @petesamuel from a presentation I gave earlier this year)

Agile UX development using low-fidelity prototypes

Jonas Folles — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 18:15:47 GMT

For me agile software projects is all about maximizing the customers’ value of the software being built by encouraging and incorporating feedback, new features and change requests as quickly and cheaply as possible. To achieve agility we adopt agile project process like Scrum, which helps us manage and prioritize the features of the software we are building into short iterations. To build a flexible code base that enables us to quickly add, remove or change features throughout the project we adopt agile development practices like Test Driven Development. We try to follow good design principles like SOLID, and we build and integrate our code frequently using Continuous Integration. But what can we do to become more agile in the way we build the User Experience (screen layout, navigation structure, colors and graphic design, imagery, error messages, texts and labels) of our application?

On most of the software projects I have worked on the User Experience have been left up to the developers to decide. Towards the end of the iteration we bring in the customer for a demonstration of what we have built, implemented as running HTML, Windows Forms or perhaps XAML code. In many cases the customer immediately starts focuses on the tiny (perhaps unimportant) details of the UX. Like, “the title should be bigger and bluer”, or “the save button should be 4 pixels to the left”. One of the reasons for this reaction might be that by demonstrating a complete implementation of the UX straight away the application looks too complete, and the customer might feel that it is too late in the project to make substantial changes to the UX of the software. However, if this does not happen and we do get good feedback, suggesting that we need to rethink the UX of the application, the reaction from the development team might be hesitation. If you have put lots of effort into building the UX of the application you don’t want to throw it away. And in contrast the business logic of the application we do not have the same refactoring and testing support for the UX of our application as we do for the other parts of the system, making it harder to make big changes with little effort.

One way to work efficiently with UX in an agile software team is to create low-fidelity prototypes. These prototypes can be created using pen and paper, or tools like Visio, PowerPoint, Balsamiq or SketchFlow. Low-fidelity prototypes feel less finished, but are at the same time concrete enough for the customer to really “get” the concepts being prototyped. Using low-fidelity prototypes the customer is more likely to give constructive feedback about the important aspects of the UX, like how the screen layout and navigation should work, which fields are needed, or how we are going to display error messages, than if they were presented with a high-fidelity prototype or near complete version of the software.

The developers are going to be less attached to a low-fidelity prototype, as the amount of effort put into it is far less compared to a real implementation done in code. Using prototyping the development team and the customer can do multiple iterations trying out different ideas and concepts for the UX, hopefully coming up with a great solution in the end. After all, good design is all about exploring multiple ideas, before narrowing it down to the right design for the problem. Good design is not about picking the first solution that pops into a developers mind.

I think UX prototyping fits perfectly with agile software development, and should be a natural tool for any agile team building software that interacts directly with end-users. My next blog post is going to be more concrete, giving an introduction to two great prototyping tools: Balsamiq and Microsoft SketchFlow.

Recording of my MVVM talk at NDC2009 is now online

Jonas Folles — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 23:28:39 GMT

The videos from NDC2009 are now published on the conference agenda site. The site isn’t the easiest to navigate, so Mark Nijhof went through the effort of creating a simple list of all the videos grouped by speaker. There is tons of great content available and the videos should be a great way to do some (relaxed) learning in the summer heat.

There is a problem with some of the links, and the link to the video of my second talk on .NET RIA Services is broken. I’ll make a new post when that video becomes available.

Click to view my Model-View-ViewModel presentation from NDC2009.

Awarded Silverlight MVP 2009!

Jonas Folles — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:26:36 GMT

Yesterday I was awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professional in Silverlight. The nomination came based on my involvement with the Silverlight community during my year in Australia. I’m truly grateful for such recognition, and am looking forward to continue to work closely with the Silverlight development community to share knowledge and learn together.

About the MVP program (from Microsoft):

Microsoft is pleased to recognize and award its Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs). We present the MVP Award to thank individuals for their exceptional contributions to technical communities worldwide. When a community participant sees an MVP in a technical community, whether in a newsgroup, as a user group host, a conference speaker, or a respondent in forums, that community participant can be confident that the information shared by the MVP will be of the highest caliber and will help every user make the most of the technology.

As with all important news: It breaks first on Twitter.

Update: My MVP profile is now available online.

NDC 2009 is history – What a blast!

Jonas Folles — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:49:59 GMT

Earlier this month I was lucky enough to both attend and speak at the Norwegian Developer Conference 2009. What a blast! The NDC09 featured a perfect mix of content – everything from the latest in technology, to the core principles of software craftsmanship and agile development. The speaker lineup this year was AMAZING, and I feel humble to be invited among such a group of incredibly talented people. Hopefully I was able to keep up with the level of the rest the speakers.

I gave two presentations at NDC09; one on the MVVM design pattern (more easily referred to as View Model) and one on .NET RIA Services. I think both talks went well – with the View Model talk being the strongest one, as this is something I’ve been presenting on many times before.

I’ve uploaded both the slides and the demos from my talks. The MVVM demo is basically a the Dive Log example application taken further, with multiple View Models communicating through an Event Aggregator and a touch of navigation using the Silverlight 3 navigation framework. The .NET RIA Services demo is a “plain” data centric application, as well as a second demo app which uses nHibernate and the XML Metadata Provider (something I have to revisit in a later blog post).

In addition to the technical content delivered at NDC09 it was great fun to hang out with old and new friends. Here are some of the highlights: Had some great conversations with Glenn Block about different aspects and approaches to the View Model pattern. Got to catch up with Andrew Browne, a good friend from the Melbourne developer community. Had dinner with Carl and Richard from .NET Rocks, Udi Dahan and Capgemini colleagues. Had tons of good conversations with fellow Norwegian developers. Went fishing with Tim Huckaby.

Thanks to all the speakers, organizers and attendees for making NDC2009 such an awesome event. Hope to see you all back there next year!

MVVM Design Pattern for Silverlight Applications

MVVM Design Pattern NDC2009

View more documents from follesoe.

Download slides:

Download demo

For a collection of more resources check out my MVVM tagged links on Delicious.

.NET RIA Services

Download slides

Download Fishbook Demo

Download Fishbook nHibernate Demo

For more resources check out my .NET RIA Services tagged links on Delicious, as well as the talk “.NET RIA Services - Building Data-Driven Applications with Microsoft Silverlight and Microsoft ASP.NET” and “Building Amazing Business Centric Applications with Microsoft Silverlight 3” from MIX09.

Mom, I'm on .NET Rocks!

Jonas Folles — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 18:06:57 GMT

This Monday I had a conversation with Carl Franklin and Richard Campell on .NET Rocks! about Silverlight, WPF, Live Mesh and different UI platforms. Having a two-way conversation on a postcast is quite different from giving a technical presentation, so I was a bit scared how this was going to turn out. Thanks to Pwop! Productions streamlined production process the episode is now available online.

.NET Rocks! (for the two of you who don’t know) is the most successful technology podcasts out there. They have been in the business of internet audio talk shows since long before the term podcast was invented, and the episode I appeared on was number 439!

I’ve been a big fan and avid listener to .NET Rocks! since the very beginning. I think episode 10 with Chris Sells was the first one I listened to back in 2002. So in many ways I’ve been following .NET Rocks! since the beginning of my professional software development career. Being invited on as a guest is a great honor.

Thanks to Richard and Carl for inviting me – and I hope to invited back on some time in the future. If you have comments or questions regarding the show feel free to post them as comments to this blog post.

MSDN Live Winter 2009 is now history!

Jonas Folles — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:14:15 GMT

Wow. Friday 20^th of March and MSDN Live Winter 2009 is now history. I delivered my last two talks on Silverlight during this round of MSDN Live in Oslo yesterday. Over the last two and a half week the MSDN Live road-show have visited Stavanger, Bergen, Trondheim and Oslo. It has been a great experience, and I’ve gotten to meet some interesting developers around the country. It has been great to hear how many people are starting to adopt Silverlight and WPF for their rich client applications, and I’m certain this trend is only going to continue.

As promised this blog post contains links to the Dive Log example application (which will be updated to Silverlight 3 shortly), as well as links to more information relevant to the two sessions I gave during MSDN Live. I've also included a Flickr Photomentury by Rune Grothaug showing a full day of MSDN Live.

Model-View-ViewModel

My first talk at MSDN was about building business focused applications using Silverlight 2. Throughout the talk I demonstrated how the MVVM pattern can help you achieve separation of concerns, and thus giving you more flexible, testable and designer friendly code. Some links to more information:

YouCard Re-visited: Implementing the ViewModel pattern
One of the first posts I wrote about the MVVM pattern, describing how I refactored my YouCard example application from REMIX to follow this patterns
YouCard Re-visited: Implementing Dependency Injection in Silverlight
A follow-up post showing how to use Dependency Injection and IoC in a Silverlight context, and how it can support the MVVM pattern.
Combining different Separated Presentation Patterns
Not everything can be achieved through data binding and commands. In some cases you need to have more access to UI specific events, for instance to implement drag-and-drop behavior in your application. This post describes how you can combine multiple UI patterns in one application. In the concrete example I combine the MVVM pattern with a Supervising Controller to implement drag-and-drop in a example application.
WPF Apps With The Model-View-ViewModel Design Pattern
A great MSDN Magazine article by Josh Smith discussing the MVVM pattern in a WPF context.
Model-View-ViewModel In Silverlight 2 Apps
A great MSDN Magazine article by Shawn Wildermuth discussing the MVVM pattern in a Silverlight context.
My delicious.com favorites tagged with MVVM

Silverlight Tips & Tricks

My second talk at MSDN was 6 different Silverlight Tips & Tricks showing how to solve some of the not-so-obvious problems in Silverlight.

Recompressing the XAP file to save download size
A Silverlight XAP file is just a standard ZIP file. By recompressing it with you can save up to 25% download size. During my talk I demonstrated the ReXapper tool, which can be easily integrated to your project as a post-build command.
Deep linking in Silverlight applications
Linking is a core concept of the web. With Rich Internet Applications in AJAX, Silverlight and Flash this becomes a challenge, as we no longer have different pages for each piece of information or screen in the application. Instead we load the application once, and then dynamically load pieces of information without navigating to a new page. This breaks the concept of linking, booking marking and back/forward navigation in the browser. To solve this we need to manually manage history state. In my blog post I use ASP.NET AJAX to solve this. Robby Ingebretsen has another approach using jQuery to manage the browser history.
Printing in Silverlight
Silverlight looks great on screen but does not have a good print story. Printing in Silverlight can be solved by opening a new window showing a server-side rendered report, or you can use the HTML Bridge to generate a client side report.
Testing in Silverlight
- Unit Testing with Silverlight 2 by Jeff Wilcox
  Jeff is the primary developer on the Silverlight testing framework, and this is probably the best introduction to Silverlight Unit Testing.
- Unit testing templates for Microsoft Silverlight 2 Beta 2
  To make things easier Jeff has prepared a Visual Studio template to set up Silverlight Unit Testing.
- What's in the pipeline for Silverlight Test Developers
  Jeff hints about what might come in the next version of the Silverlight testing framework.
- Unit Testing Asynchronous Code in Silverlight
  This is a post I did back in June describing how to use the Asynchronous attribute, and how to write asynchronous tests in Silverlight.
- Silverlight NUnit Projects
  Jamie Cansdale explains how to use NUnit to do Silverlight testing. The benefit of using NUnit is that you can run your tests outside the browser, execute the tests from TestDriven.Net, and even get code coverage. For integration testing (network, browser integration) you still need to use the Silverlight Testing Framework from Microsoft.

Hopefully you enjoyed this round of MSDN Live and got a good introduction on how to build Silverlight 2 applications. If you have any questions related to the presentations feel free to post them in the comments section. The code and slides are available as downloads from my SkyDrive (embedded in the blog post).

Dive Log and Flickr Demo	Slides for both presentations

Speaking at MSDN Live next month

Jonas Folles — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 21:41:53 GMT

I know. It’s been too long since my last post, and just to clarify; I’m not dead, nor have I been eaten by sharks or anything like that. I’ve just been busy rebooting my life back in Trondheim after coming back from Australia. I started working again in Trondheim in the beginning on January and went straight back on to a Windows Forms/WPF project I helped start up back in September 2007. It has been really fun to see how the code base has evolved over the year I’ve been gone. After getting back on the project I’ve spent most my time developing WPF components inside the Windows Forms client. It’s been an interesting experience, and I’m really happy with how well WPF integrates with existing Windows Forms applications. I will definitely be blogging about some of my experiences around WPF and Windows Forms in the weeks to come.

However, the main reason for the slowdown in posts is not work related. Hege and I just bought an apartment, and ever since we moved in all available time have gone to painting walls, shopping for furniture and all kinds of other things you need to get in order when moving into a new place. We are really happy with the apartment, and things are really starting to shape up. We finished painting the last room this weekend. I will be posting a “tour of the geek crib” once all the tech stuff (fun stuff) is in place.

Okay – enough excuses for not blogging. The more topic of this blog post is that I’m doing a series of talks on Silverlight 2 during the MSDN Live tour. First stop of the tour is Stavanger (05. March), before moving on to Bergen (10. March), Trondheim (12. March) and finally Oslo (19. March). I will be giving two sessions, one on developing data centric/business focused Silverlight 2 applications (similar to my Tech Ed Talk), and one on Silverlight 2 tips and tricks. The tips and tricks session will be 5-6 covering things like printing, deep linking, search engine optimization, design time support, continuous integration etc.

I’ve included the session abstract (in Norwegian):

Forretningsapplikasjoner i Silverlight 2
Silverlight 2 ble lansert nå i høst og legger et godt grunnlag for utviklere som ønsker å lage rike internett applikasjoner (RIA) basert på .NET. I denne sesjonen går vi i dypden på Silverlight 2 som utviklingsplattform og fordelene ved å velge Silverlight 2 som plattform for data-sentriske forretningsapplikasjoner. Sesjonen vil blandt annet dekke dataaksess via sikrede WCF tjenester, hvordan strukturere koden ved hjelp av Model-View-ViewModel patternet (MVVM), hvordan skrive kode designere kan jobbe med, og enkle Blend-tips for utviklere. Sesjonen vil bygges rundt en dykkeloggapplikasjon hvor koden vil bli gjort tilgjengelig etter presentasjonen.

Tips og triks for Silverlight 2-utviklere
denne andre sesjonen vil vi bygge videre på dykkeloggen og fokusere på en del konkrete tips og triks for Silverlight 2-utviklere. Tett integrasjon med nettleseren er viktig for en best mulig brukeropplevelse. Vi vil blant annet se på hvordan integrere med fram/tilbake knappene i nettleseren, hvordan optimalisere Silverlight applikasjoner for søkemotorer, hvordan bruke dyplenking i Silverlight og hvordan håndtere utskrift fra Silverlight. Presentasjonen vil gå i dybden på blant annet HTML-bridgen som brukes for å integrere Silverlight med JavaScript som allerede kjører på siden, eller for å aksessere nettleserens DOM.

One of the sad things about this round of MSDN Live is that Microsoft have to charge for it. Previously MSDN Live have been a free (and really popular) event, but Microsoft is feeling the financial crisis just like everyone else. So in order to be able to deliver MSDN Live this time they had to charge for it. Børge Hansen from Microsoft Norway and Jon Torresdal from NNUG Bergen have shared their thoughts on this decision. I was really bummed about this decision myself, but I really hope that you find the content presented at MSDN Live interesting, and that you get a chance to attend.

Since this post is about upcoming speaking engagement I figure I could finish the post by sharing a time lapse video of a Silverlight 2 presentation I did last week at the local university. The time lapse is created by Pete J Samuel, a colleague of mine at Capgemini Trondheim.

Hope to see you at MSDN Live in Stavanger, Bergen, Trondheim or Oslo!

Mesh-enabling the Dive Log Silverlight Application

Jonas Folles — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 10:51:27 GMT

One of the big themes of PDC this year was Windows Azure and Microsoft’s cloud computing initiative. Live Services is one of the building blocks of Windows Azure, and includes a set of services known as Live Mesh. I did a blog post about Live Mesh back in April when it was first announced. With lots of enthusiasm I speculated about how this would enable us to build offline/desktop enabled Silverlight applications. During the second day keynote Scott Guthrie, coding hero and vice president at Microsoft, announced that;

Photo by DBegley - check out original on Flickr

This announcement immediately caused a lot of buzz in the Twitter-sphere. What made the announcement even more interesting is that a lot of people didn’t quite get what Scott was talking about, or if they even showed Silverlight running outside the browser at all. So what was the Silverlight out-of-browser story at PDC? After Scotts keynote Anthony Rose entered stage and demoed their BBC iPlayer. He didn’t explicitly say that this was the “Silverlight running on the desktop”-story, but what he was showing was the iPlayer implemented as a Mesh-Enabled Silverlight application running on the desktop!

Photo by DBegley - check out the original on Flickr

In this blog post I’m going to show how I Mesh-enabled the Dive Log application using the Live Framework. I will also try to cover some of the benefits of using Live Mesh as an application platform for web application.

Where do you start?

To build Mesh-Enabled Web Applications you need access to the Live Framework SDK and Tools. The SDK is currently only available in a private CTP, and to get access you need to apply for a token through the Microsoft Connect site. I don’t know how many people they will let in on the CTP, or how long the process of getting a token takes.

Once you have downloaded and installed the SDK you get a new project type called Live Framework, which comes in two flavors; “Mesh-enabled Web Application” and “Silverlight Mesh-enabled Web Application”. The difference is that the first one is for writing JavaScript and HTML based Mesh-applications, while the second is for Silverlight applications that use the Live Framework libraries.

After selecting the “Silverlight Mesh-enabled Web Application” template you get a new solution with two projects; a Silverlight 2 project and a Live Framework project. The Live Framework project has a reference to the Silverlight project, and contains a simple HTML and JavaScript file to embed the Silverlight application on the HTML page. The project also contains an icon for the application, and an XML manifest file describing the application. The Silverlight project has references to two new assemblies; Microsoft.LiveFX.Client and Microsoft.LiveFX.ResourceModel. These are the Live Framework libraries that give you a managed API for Live Services. All Live Services are based on open protocols and standards like HTTP, ATOM, FeedSync and RSS, so you could write applications without these libraries, in any language or platform you like, but Live Framework makes it allot easier by providing a nice abstraction layer on top of the web services.

Mesh-enabling the Dive Log application

The first thing I did after creating a new Live Framework project was to remove the automatically generated Silverlight 2 project. Instead I included my existing Dive Log Silverlight project and referenced the Live Framework Silverlight assemblies.

The Dive Log application was originally written as a demo for my TechEd talks back in September. One of the things I wanted to demonstrate was how to use the Model-View-ViewModel pattern in a Silverlight application, and how this can make your application easier to design in Expression Blend. The way I did that is to use dependency injection to inject a mock-implementation of any external dependencies, like web service proxies, into the view model. That way the mock service can generate sample data when the code is being consumed in Expression Blend. When the application is running in the browser the real web service will be used.

The benefit of this design is that I can easily configure my inversion of control container to use different implementations of different application services. So to first run the Dive Log application inside Live Mesh I simply configured the IoC container to always use the mock implementation of the web service. That way I could deploy my application to Live Mesh without having to prepare my web services for cross domain access.

After TechEd I have extended the Dive Log application with new features like printing support and support for back- and forward navigation in the browser. These features depend on the ASP.NET AJAX client library to be available on the page hosting the application. For my Mesh-enabled Dive Log I can’t depend on these libraries to be present, and I guess they don’t make sense when the application is deployed on the desktop anyway. So to disable these features I simply made an empty implementation of the IPrintDives and IManageHistory interfaces and configured my IoC container to use these to handle browser history and printing.

Once the application was configured to use the mock web service, and to disable printing and history, I could simply hit F5 to build and deploy the application to Live Mesh. The Live Framework project template includes a build task that will connect and deploy the application to Live Mesh. Currently there is no local development environment for Mesh-enabled web applications, something that can be a little bit bothersome as you have to redeploy the application to Live Mesh every time you make a change.

Mapping the Dive Log against the Live Framework Resource Model

The next step of Mesh-enabling the Dive Log application is to use the Live Framework Resource Model as the data storage for logged dives. The original application uses a web service to store dives remotely. This diagram shows a high level overview of the Live Framework Resource model. The blue boxes indicate the main components the Dive Log application will use.

As I mentioned earlier the web service is an external dependency that is injected into the View Model using an IoC container. A trick I’ve used on many projects is to extract an interface defining the methods and events used on the web service client class. I then use a partial class to implement this interface on the automatically generated web service client class. This enables me to implement multiple versions of the interface, for instance for design time data or unit testing. This design enables me implement a new service that reads and writes dives to the Live Framework Resource Model. A simple configuration change of the IoC container will inject the Live Framework based service to the View Model. That way I don’t have to change any code in the UI or the View Model to use Live Mesh as my data storage.

The next challenge I faced was figuring out how to map my Dive Log application against the different concepts of the Live Framework Resource Model. After reading about the resource model my initial idea was to create one Mesh Object for each Dive Log, and then start adding items to a Data Feed. When I tried to create a new Mesh Object from my Silverlight application I got some weird exceptions. After discussion this on the Live Framework forum I learned that Mesh-enabled web applications don’t have permission to create new Mesh Objects. After some more trail-and-error, as well as watching sessions Live Framework sessions from PDC I came up with the following mapping of Dive Log concepts against the Live Framework Resource Model:

The Mesh Object is the level of granularity for sharing, synchronization and authorization. In fact each instance of a Mesh-enabled web application is in itself a Mesh Object. This means that each Mesh-enabled web application got access to a single Mesh Object; the object representing the application instance. This enables you to share application instances with other users, and the Live Framework Client will synchronize the Mesh Object (application instance) across your devices. If you want to create two dive logs, one for hobby dives and one for professional dives, you simply create two application instances. This would create two Mesh Objects, one for each instance, which you could shared with other users and synchronize across devices. The following diagram illustrates the application sharing model. Each instance is a Mesh Object shared with another user, and both the application and its data get synchronized between users.

Coding against the Live Framework Resource Model

After working out how to map the Dive Log against the Live Framework Resource Model the next step was to write the actual implementation of the storage service. This was fairly straight forward as the Live Framework provides a nice API to work with the Live Services. In fact the complete implementation of the Live Framework backed storage service was less than 200 lines of code. One of the changes I had to make to my Dive-object was to add a new Mesh ID so that I could map Dive-objects against Sync Entry objects. When the user clicks the save button the code will create a new Sync Entry object and set the Dive-object as the user data. This enables you to serialize custom objects into a Mesh Sync/Data Entry. Both Sync- and Data Entries hang of a Data Feed. The main difference is that Sync Entries is the implementation of the Feed Sync standard. This helps you deal with synchronization of data across devices. This is helpful since multiple users could be writing data to the same application instance, some who might be offline and only synchronize data back into the cloud at a later stage.

The following piece of code shows the implementation of the save method. The code will iterate over each dive being saved and check if it has been changed. If the object is changed the code will see if it can find a Sync Entry matching the Dive. If it finds a Sync Entry it will update the object by calling SetUserData. If no Sync Entry can be found a new one is created and the dive object is stored by calling SetUserData on the new Sync Entry. Finally the Synchronize method is called on the Data Feed. This will push any changes made locally back into the cloud, as well as read any new objects added remotely by other users/devices.

Benefits from Mesh-enabling the Dive Log application

Mesh-enabled web applications are a new type of applications. They are developed using web techniques like HTML, CSS, JavaScript or Silverlight, but can be deployed to the Live Mesh, and executed both inside the browser and on the desktop. This new application model opens up several new scenarios, and I think the Dive Log is a good example of an application that can benefit from being Mesh-enabled.

No need for server infrastructure
As an application developer I can release the Dive Log application to the world without having to worry about server infrastructure. The application is deployed to Live Mesh, and all data is stored in the cloud. The user is in control of its own data and, and all dives are stored in an open ATOM based format that can be read by other applications.
Don’t have to worry about authentication and authorization
I don’t have to worry about authentication, user management and authorization. All this is handled by Live Mesh and the Live Framework. The user authenticates using their Live ID, and authorization is managed by setting permissions on the Mesh-enabled application.
Transparent offline and online support
My Dive Log application can work both offline and online. This is a big deal as a user might be interested in logging dives on his laptop onboard a boat far at sea. This would be hard to do in traditional web applications. With Mesh-enabled web applications the application is synchronized to the laptop, and any data added offline will be synchronized back into the cloud when a connection is available. The best thing is that you as an application developer don’t have to worry about it. The Live Framework client libraries will detect if the user is offline or online, and use the correct service endpoint (remote or local).
Making the Dive Log application social
By Mesh-enabling the Dive Log application I get access to a big social network. Users can share their Dive Logs with friends, invite other users to use the application, and share news stories as the log new dives.

These are just some of the benefits from Mesh-enabling the Dive Log application. I think Live Mesh and Live Services are going to be an interesting application platform to watch as it matures. Currently the benefits for consumer based applications are obvious. It will be interesting to see if this platform can provide value for more business focused applications.

Download the Mesh-enabled Dive Log application

I have uploaded the source code of the Mesh-enabled Dive Log application. It is a simple Silverlight 2 application without the Live Framework project. You need to download and install the Live Framework SDK separately and then create a new Mesh-enabled Silverlight Project. Follow the steps described earlier in this post and add the Dive Log Silverlight application to your Live Framework project.

I have also published the Dive Log application to Live Mesh if you just want to run it as an end-user. You need to use the Live Mesh Tech Preview online environment, as well as download the Live Mesh Tech Preview client (if you want to run the application from your desktop and not only inside the browser).

Last User Group Presentation in Australia

Jonas Folles — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 09:15:27 GMT

I had originally planned that my Silverlight Designer & Developer Network presentation was going to be the last one I gave in Australia before flying back to Norway. But then me and Hege decided to do some traveling before going home, and we’re currently up in Byron Bay enjoying some diving and surfing. Wednesday we fly down to Sydney for a couple of days, and my good friend Adam Cogan asked if I could give a Silverlight talk at the Sydney .NET User Group. Off course I said yes – so Wednesday evening (December 10th) I’m giving a talk on business applications in Silverlight. The title and abstract goes as follow:

Building data-centric applications in Silverlight 2
In this presentation you will get a overview of how to build data-centric (line-of-business) applications in Silverlight 2 using LINQ to SQL and WCF on the server. The presentation will cover how to deal with authentication for your WCF services from a Silverlight application, tips on how to architect your Silverlight application, and how to build flexible, testable code your designers can work with. You will also get a sneak preview of an application framework Microsoft is working on to make building business applications easier.

For registration, time and location check out the Sydney .NET User Group web site. I expect the details to be published some time over the weekend.

While in Sydney we’re going to stay at our favorite accommodation in Coogee, which is going to be great. We plant to finally see the opera house (I’ve been to Sydney multiple times for work, but have never actually seen the building!). Friday we fly down to Canberra to spend the weekend with a friend, before flying back to Melbourne Monday, and then back to Norway Wednesday December 17th.

Hope to see you in Sydney!

Update: The details are now available on the SSW site and on their Facebook group.

Time and Place Date: Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Time: 6:00pm - 9:00pm
Location: Microsoft HQ, North Ryde
Street: 1 Epping Road, North Ryde NSW 2113
City/Town: Lane Cove, Australia