Rants Tagged with “MSDN”
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I've been digging into the Entity Framework and Astoria and decided to create a quick little mashup of Silverlight and those two technologies. The result is this little product viewer using the Northwind database:
The goal of the project was to use Silverlight 1.1 to design the UI, Entity Framework to design the DAL and use Astoria for the client-server communication. I am pretty happy with the result. I am using September previews of Entity Framework and Astoria as well as the Alpha of Silverlight 1.1 so the site may have problems from time to time as these are early releases of the products.
Astoria in particular is a very early build (and they've even changed the search syntax already so when the new version is released I'll change this). The September version of Astoria comes with a Silverlight client data layer that just does not work for me currently. But that wasn't a problem as Astoria (for those who don't know) is a REST-based API for access a data model. Astoria supports returning results in XML, JSON and RDP. So all I did was use the JSON format and Silverlight 1.1's built-in JavascriptSerialilzer to convert the results to in-memory objects.
You can download the source here:
http://www.silverlightdata.com/mashup.zip
UPDATE: Doesn't seem to work with Firefox. I believe this is an issue with Astoria (astoria is changing the search syntax to be more compatible with other browsers). Might also be my resizing logic. I'll see if I can get it working with FF later this week.
Come see me and Glen Gordon talk at Phipps Plaza in Atlanta about Visual Studio 2008, "Astoria", Entity Framework and Silverlight...and see them working gracefully together!
Click here to register for the event before it fills up.
I've blogged about how short-sighted it seemed that the Expression tools were not going to be available to MSDN Subscribers. I am glad to report that they have come to their senses! I think it is a great comprimise to include Blend and Web in MSDN. Expression Design and Video will still require additional licensing outside of MSDN, but they are less developer tools anyway.
I want to thank everyone inside of Microsoft who I know lobbied hard for this. It was a big political fight and it required opinions across the company to sway the decision. I for one will appreciate the benefits of this fight.
Maybe I am being paranoid, but there is a story on the MSDN home page that says, "New Year's Resolution: Create a Fully Distributed Enterprise Application Using DevForce". Its a direct link to a commercial product. Is this the first time a ad has masqueraded as a MSDN story? It just seems wrong to me...
Anyone else?
While I like the Expression Studio toolset I am dismayed that these tools will not be available for most developers without the extra expense. It seems at this point that Expression Studio will *NOT* be available as part of MSDN Subscriptions, but instead will require separate purchase options. It would seem to me that Expression would widen the MSDN subscription base to include designers in organizations and improve early adoption of the tools as it would get them in people's hands faster.
I hope Microsoft revisits this decision and reverses it.
