Noam King's Blog

Once more, we are meeting in Microsoft for the monthly meeting of the Web Developers community

also know as WDC. This time Alex Golsh is going to talk about one of the most hottest subjects on the web these days, and it's of course... well you guessed right... Silverlight.

Anyone of you that heard about it and wanted to know more, heard about the old versions or is working with the technology today and want to get it right... you must be there !!!

I think that Silverlight is one of the most important Beta technology out there today for web developers, and it's putting web developers in a whole different sphere of creativity for their sites.

Of course Alex is digging bits and bites in Silverlight for  quite a long period and he is the one that gave (along with Tamir Khason) the excellent session about XNA on last TechEd (Eilat), so it's going to be delicious :-)

Details and Registration

I'll love to see you all again.

(BTW, once more, this meeting is a consequence of your feedback about the subjects that you are interested about, so... keep giving me feedback on paper, email, and comments to this blog)

One of the most powerful aspects of Dynamic data is the fact that you have the ability to control the  behavior of your data model and according to the rules that you choose to enforce, the dynamic data module decide which tables and fields to show, and... the most important thing is how to show them.

You can have all that if you'll just take a look at the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.dll.

This DLL will help you to annotate your model (customize it) with the proper attributes to tell the Dynamic Data module how to treat your model layer, like if you want to scaffold it to the user, and how to validate your fields and so on.

To know more about how to work with Data Annotations, I recommend you to watch this ScreenCast :

Download the screencast(WMV)

Enjoy,

Dynamic data is a technology that lets you build really quickly a full data aware application that is

controlled form the model itself. The nice thing is that you can keep your application updated without touching your pages, and you can customize exactly how any of your fields and tables will behave through the Model layer.

One of the nice features in SP1 is that you can now build a project with Dynamic Data to ADO.NET Entity Framework (Click to Enlarge).

With this new option you can choose your data model to be the layer of Entity Framework and by that you can have the following main benefits :

1. You can work with several databases and not only with MSSQL like in Linq2Sql.
2. You have a lot more options to play with than with Linq2Sql, and the model is a bit more complex because of that.
3. The data source can be any number of sources like replication, BI, etc (you are not constrained to database only relations).

And to sum it up, you just have a lot more control on your data layer than with any other model currently out there in VS.

The good news are that from today you can easily build a Dynamic data project that is sitting on top of that model, so not only you are able to build your model layer with a great ease and control any field mapping and properties, you can easily scaffold them out to the web the way you want to.

Watch this short video to see how to start working with Dynamic Data for entities :

Download the screencast(WMV)

You can find more information about ADO.NET Entity Framework on Guy Burstein Blog at these posts :

· EntityDataSource - Overview

· EntityDataSource - Where Clause

Enjoy,

You must admit that the framework that we all knew, became a really big one one the last releases of visual studio, and if we look forward it seems that our big tool box or shall I call it a box of tools (not to be confused with the popping up one for visual controls) is just getting bigger and the tools are getter shinier.

If we'll try to look at what SP1 is going to offer us this summer, we better take a look at the beta that just came out today, and we'll see a lot of great additions to the current version of visual studio. I'll concentrate on the Web side this time, and I'll talk about the following subjects on my following posts so stay tuned :

Dynamic Data to Entities

You can now build Dynamic data projects that are using ADO.NET Entities FW.

System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.dll

All the new Attributes for customizing dynamic pages with some few changes and some new staff from the previous version.

System.Web.Abstractions.dll

More helper classes for mocking to the rescue, so writing tests is now more robust with httpContextBase, HttpRequestBase, HttpResponseBase. (more Base abstract classes and more wrappers than previous version like ApplicationStateBase and Wrapper, and a few more… ).

System.web.routing.dll

The routing mechanism is now available to all web applications so you can control the look of your Urls from any web site, and the the new dynamic data project template is doing it out of the box.

You can find more information about the new assemblies in VS2008 SP1 beta on Guy Burstein Blog at this post : New Assemblies in Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5 SP1.

Download VS2008 SP1 beta

Enjoy