Pre-Max Chicago Silverlight Dream Camp

by Don Burnett..

Chicago: not just for Adobe (Come early for Max, and be WOWED! and it's FREE!)

If you are just blown away with all the Adobe "goodness", and you want to come home to Silverlight, you can always attend Silverlight DevCamp Chicago, a couple of days before Adobe MAX.. FOR FREE... (yep you got that right, for FREE!)

Silverlight DevCamp Chicago

Date:
September 28-29, 2007 (Friday night until Saturday afternoon) event on Upcoming

Time:
Friday (09/28): 7pm-10pm / Saturday (09/29): 11am-5pm / Possible Happy Hour afterwards - Location TBD

Location:
Clarity Consulting 1 N Franlkin St Suite 3400 Chicago, IL 60606
If you are planning to attend in-person, please visit the SilverlightDevCampChicago Attendees page and add your name and contact info.

SilverlightDevCampChicago is an upcoming gathering, inspired by BarCamp, to build Silverlight applications, It's organized by volunteers & Silverlight enthusiasts, with attendance free to all. It's the same weekend as Adobe MAX, but Adobe MAX costs $1,495. This is free to attend. Plus you can help plan it or lead sessions with a simple edit of the event wiki page.

While similar to iPhoneDevCamp this event is focused on a singular technology, we'd like offer some diverse sessions like using PHP to generate Silverlight content, IronRuby/IronPython & the DLR or Moonlight on Linux.

Attendees will include web designers, developers, testers, all working together over the weekend to build Silverlight applications, share experiences, ask questions, and push the limits of web application design. If you're interested in Silverlight, but haven't had time to learn, this is your chance to get up to speed. Plus you'll be able network with other developers in the Chicago area who are interested in Silverlight.

In the barcamp spirit, this is a community event driven by developers around the area. If you have ideas for topics or you want to show off some Silverlight applications you've built, please add it to SilverlightDevCampChicagoSessions

Session Schedule

Friday night

7:00pm - 7:30pm
Welcome, registration, get settled

7:30pm - 8:00pm
Keynote

8:00pm - 10:00pm
Session planning, happy hour, networking, games

Saturday

11:00am - 11:30am
Welcome, registration, get settled

11:30am - 12:00pm
Keynote - Architecting a SilverLight .Net Application - George Durzi / Jonathan Heupel

12:00pm - 1:30pm
lunch, networking, games

1:30pm - 2:00pm
Silverlight / Facebook - Ryan Powers

2:00pm - 2:30pm
Silverlight / Twitter - Dave Bost aka SilverTwitter

3:30pm - 4:00pm
Devin Rader - Topic TBD

4:00pm - 4:30pm
MVC approach for components in Silverlight - Gilbert Corrales

4:30pm - 5:00pm
Session

What's really exciting about this is seeing this in Chicago a few days before Max, and it's a Silverlight community event. This isn't even a Microsoft event and has no Microsoft corporate sponsorship. It just really shows the exciting foothold that Silverlight is taking on the market and the fact that it's growing so fast. It shows me that Silverlight has a good future ahead of it. The exciting thing I'd mention about the schedule is that they plan to focus on Silverlight development outside of the Visual Studio/Expression toolset and even talking about the Linux version of the plug-in. So if you want a good community perspective without the "marketing" plugs, this is a good way to come and learn about Silverlight from a non-platform specific point-of-view especially if you are a Mac or Linux person wanting to develop on those platforms

Technorati tags: BarCamp, Silverlight, Chicago, Adobe Max, FREE training, Cross Platform

Silverlight + Astoria= Powerful Web Services and Data Access

by Don Burnett

A lot of people have heard about Astoria by now, it was introduced by Pablo Castro at Mix'07, it's goal is to let you enable applications to expose data as a data service that can be consumed by web clients within a corporate network and across the internet. The data service is useable over HTTP, and URIs are used to identify the various pieces of information available through the service.

Interactions with the data service happens in terms of HTTP verbs such as GET, POST, PUT and DELETE, and the data exchanged in those interactions is represented in simple formats such as XML and JSON.

That is great for Ajax web developers, but for a lot of people looking to do Silverlight development getting data into the Silverlight plug-in hasn't been easy at best and it's been a matter of just message passing over JavaScript.

However this week Silverlight got a new friend in the Astoria Silverlight Client API. It is a new client library that makes it possible to access Astoria data sources from within Silverlight. This gives Silverlight it's first rich data access capability and opens up Silverlight applications to consuming whole new sources of data directly.

This week the folks at MS Live Labs allow us to extend this further by creating our own database and web service online by defining the web service entity model, which you can also do at http://astoria.livelabs.com/OnlineService.aspx. This is cool because they let you test it out online, but if you must, you can also download the toolkit and play with it from within SQL Server Express and Visual Studio 2008 beta.

It's not much different than using Access or SQL server to define tables and keys, relationships and fields and can be done from the web page after this you are done and you are given back connectivity to the webservice via a URL.. My sample looks like this.. (this is post defining my entity model)..

https://astoria.sandbox.live.com/users/donburnett/donburnett.rse

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<DataService xml:base="https://astoria.sandbox.live.com/users/donburnett/donburnett.rse">
<Container uri=".">
<Customers href="Customers" />
</Container>
</DataService>

It's very easy to create an Astoria data service, the URL requires sign-in to windows live (formerly passport), adding great security as well..

Astoria, although a research product at the moment has much promise, and anyone interested in quickly adapting SQL data base to web services or easily creating new web based data services. Because it works over HTTP is is both efficient and beautiful. The new Silverlight client library gives transparent access to this very cool data service functionality. Microsoft wants you to play with it too. I suggest you go over there and try it. It seems like a great solution for Silverlight. It does require the latest version of Silverlight 1.1 to work with the library.. If you want data access to data services/web services I really recommend you check this out..

Technorati tags: Astoria, Web Services, Data Services, Silverlight1.1, Astoria Silverlight Client API