Articles

In the previous article, we’ve introduced contracts in Windows 8. To quickly recapitulate, a contract allows Metro style applications in Windows 8 to communicate which each other or with Windows, without there being a hard reference between the participants of the communication. We’ve seen how the search contract allows applications to open themselves up to Windows so they can be search. There’s of course a contract that specifies how this searching is to be done: an application has to follow the rules specified in the contract so that Windows can communicate with the app in the way it needs to do.

Welcome to the fifth part of this article series on strategies for designing your application for a multitude of different clients.  In the first part, we’ve looked into the business case & some general concerns, and in the second part, we made a choice for a service layer: WCF RIA Services.  In the third part, we’ve seen how we can use MEF for on demand loading & code reuse across different clients, and in the fourth part, we’ve learned how to load a multitude of assemblies on demand, and we’ve learned how we can navigate to views in an on-demand loaded assembly by implementing a custom content loader in combination with a view factory.

In the first parts of the series about developing the SilverlightShow Windows Phone app I explained the general development process and the technical details of accessing and optimizing the RSS feeds of the site. Now that we are able to access all of the content from the phone, the next step is to take a look at what was necessary to display what we have to the user while preserving a native look and feel. If you haven't seen the app in action, here is a short video about it.

In the first part of this mini series I was mostly talking about the process of developing the SilverlightShow Windows Phone application, and didn't discuss any of the technical specifics. Today I want to dive into some of the details around downloading and optimizing RSS feeds. I not only want to give you insight into the particular problems we were facing, but also some hopefully useful advice and guidelines should you ever want to develop a similar feature for your own application. If you haven't used or seen the app yet, you can watch a quick intro video here and find it on the Marketplace here.

In the previous article of this series, we wrote our first lines of code for WinRT. The main message was that although WinRT is a new API, we can still use our familiar languages to create Metro style applications. We have used the XAML/C# combination, but it’s perfectly possible to use XAML/VB or XAML/C++ as well. We’ll be using more of the API in the coming articles but in this article, we’ll focus on some specifics around contracts, more specifically, the Search contract. Contracts enable Metro applications to communicate with each other or with Windows itself without there being a hard reference in place.

In this short SilverlightShow interview we talk with Braulio Diez who is a co-author of the recently released e/book ‘Mastering LOB Development for Silverlight 5: A Case Study in Action’. Thanks to Packt Publishing, SilverlightShow readers may now purchase this book with a 27% discount using discount code dssvl2! Enjoy!

SilverlightShow: Hi Braulio! We have recently announced your new book ‘Mastering LOB Development for Silverlight 5: A Case Study in Action’ on SilverlightShow Book Shelf, and it already got an unusually high number of visits.

In the recent days an epocal change is becoming evident. If you tried to download the new Windows 8 Consumer Preview, available for free on Microsoft website, you know what I mean. The change, that is greatly focused on a new user experience, is driven by the growing power of portable devices that are becoming prevalent on common desktop and laptops. Up to the day before today, tablet PCs, smartphones, and generically speaking touch-enabled devices was expensive and not effective, but they are now something that common people start to take in serious consideration from the effectiveness perspective and also from the economical point of view.

LOB (Line of Business) applications executing within a web browser are fine, but if we think from the perspective of a final user, it is not the option that they would choose first. This is due to the fact that:

• Having a desktop application is easy. It can be directly accessed by double-clicking so that it is launched quickly.
• Most of the time, it is necessary to leave Silverlight sandbox application. This happens, for example, when we need to access the filesystem, or with a special hardware via COM (such as an ATM).

At the end of February, the official SilverlightShow Windows Phone app has been accepted into the Marketplace. The app gives you access to some of the content of this website, including news, articles and events, and is completely free for use (also ad-free!). Some of the convenience features include the possibility to create reminders for upcoming events and webinars directly on your phone, to get notifications about new content in the form of live tiles, and to maintain a local list of favorites that allows you to permanently store items for later reading.