Over the next few months I will be covering SoCal doing a talk on Rich Internet Applications (RIA) using ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 and Silverlight. The inspiration for this talk comes from the convergence I see between some of the Web 2.0 technologies and Silverlight and the coming of age of Web 3.0. I am hoping I will be able to cover some of the challenges you will face when interacting with these technologies and provide some guidance as you move forward creating applications of this type.
Information and Dates
Title
Building RIA Applications for Web 3.0
Description
Web 3.0 will prove to be the incarnation that moves us into highly interactive applications that exploit the advances in UI graphics, module web applications and the ever increasing internet connection speed to provide users with an online experience never seen before. In this session we will take a look into how some of the new Microsoft Web technologies (ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 and Silverlight) will play a role in this new frontier. First will take a look at ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 and how some of the new features like templates and data binding are contributing to a pure client-side story for web development. Then we will dive into Silverlight exploring the extensive UI model, robust communication stack and reliance on .NET and how these features provide a robust environment for creating truly interactive module web applications. Finally we will look at how the HTML Bridge in Silverlight provides interaction between the dynamic language world of JavaScript and the static language world of .NET and how to best work in these two environments to provide a rich Web 3.0 experience.
Dates and Locations
Tuesday September 22nd
San Diego .Net User Group
www.sandiegodotnet.com
Saturday October 25th
SoCal Code Camp (USC)
http://www.socalcodecamp.com/
Tuesday November 4th
San Diego .Net Developers Group
http://www.sddotnetdg.org/
Tuesday November 11th
Disney .NET Developers Group
Tuesday November 11th
Silverlight User Group SiG
http://www.ocdotnet.org/SIGs/WPFSliverlightUserGroupSIG/tabid/175/Default.aspx
So I am using the new Data Designer in VS 2008 to create my LINQ to SQL DataContext and associated data classes and one of the first thing I wanted to do was to send back one of these "data classes" to an AJAX client via a AJAX-enabled web service. I write the code to return a SalesTerritory class "yes I am using the infamous AdventureWorks database" and hook up all of the associated code and try to run the thing. To my surprise things didn't work. I open up Nikhil Kothari's Web Development Helper to find out I have a serialization error.
"Type 'RIASilverlightWeb.Data.SalesTerritory' cannot be serialized. Consider marking it with the DataContractAttribute attribute, and marking all of its members you want serialized with the DataMemberAttribute attribute.
Well this really bummed me out. I sure the heck didn't want to decorate all of that generated code with DataContact/DataMember stuff. To my surprise MS has made this easy. All you need to do is go to the properties of the designer and set the SerializationMode to Unidirectional (see below).
What this does is decorate all of your classes with the DataContract attribute and all of your properties with the DataMember attribute. Once you do this the data can be serialized.
This can also be done with SQLMetal using the /serialization:Unidirectional command flag.