RIA Services Updating Queries

I am working on a Silverlight 4 and RIA Services. I needed to take a query from the server and update it every minute or with a button press. I put the code in to clear a local collection and re-call the query. I ran all of my tests using VS2010 on my laptop and everything worked great. I put the Silverlight app up on the server and gave it to someone that was doing a demo. It failed to do any updating.

At first, I thought it was an IIS caching issue. I have seen IIS do this with other projects. We tried a few things and it did not work at all. So I did a little bit a research on the RIA call that I was using for the callback. I was using this call...

theContext.Load(theContext.GetInfoByPageQuery(page), OnAllInfoLoaded, null);

Looking at the Load help, I tried out a different version that adds a LoadBehavior to the parameters.

theContext.Load(theContext.GetInfoByPageQuery(page), LoadBehavior.RefreshCurrent, OnAllInfoLoaded, null);

When I put this on the server it updated everything perfectly. This is something that alot of the online samples do not have in them so I thought I would share it.

I will be posting more about my adventures in Silverlight 4 and RIA services soon.

BizSpark

At the .NET user group meeting that I presented at last night some people were interested in BizSpark. Here is the link for it. You will also need a person to approve you. I suggest using Bob Walsh ( http://47hats.com/ ) He is the largest referrer for the program in the world. When you email Bob make sure to put BizSpark in the title.

BizSpark
http://www.microsoft.com/BizSpark/

.NET on the iPhone

Novell, who makes Mono - the open source, multi-platform .NET implementation, has not release MonoTouch. I was in the beta for this and found it to be extremely exciting.

You are able to use C# on the iPhone and iPod Touch. C# is the only .NET language supported right now. It uses MonoDevelop as the IDE for developing but uses the normal Interface Builder that you use from XCode, which is the default development platform for iPhone development. So if you are going ot use MonoTouch, you still need to have a Mac. I purchased a MacMini for my iPhone development. I know, I know, it is not a Microsoft product and I have drank the MS koolaid. I had put off doing this for a while but in reality it is the best way to get an iPhone app developed. It is not the only way but the simplest. Plus normally iPhone apps are written in Object-C. I can safely say that I really dislike Objective-C. C# is so much easier to use for me because I use it all day long and have for years.

Now this is the first version of the system. And on the iPhone you cannot have dynamically linked components. Everything is linked into the executable, so MonoTouch had to do that as well. They also provided a way to call a C library so that you can have things built in Objective-C and used in a C# based product.

Currently they have two versions available, Individual and the Enterprise. This is if you want to do enterprise releases or not. They are talking about an evaluation version soon, but did not get it out when they released. overall it is not a cheap tool for a single person, but if you look at it from the cost of your time, you will easily make it up in the first app that you develop.

Yes, I know that this is a post on iPhone development and I am actually spending alot of time on this myself right now, but it is also using .NET. It shows that .NET is a popular system that people want to use on many different platforms. And this is the first time it is available for the iPhone.

Free Online Training with Microsoft Ramp Up

Chris Bowen posted a great link to some free online training from Microsoft.

Check out http://www.myrampup.com/ for info. It includes training on ASP.NET, changing from PHP to ASP.NET and other topics (including VS2008 and Windows Mobile 6)

Get training on things. Hopefully if you are looking for work it might help you out.

Certification Presentation

This week I gave a presentation on Microsoft certifications. I currently have 11 certifications and wanted to share some ideas to help others get their certifications as well. With the job market like it is, we can all use a boost up to help us. Here is the presentation for all to enjoy. If you need it in an older version of Powerpoint, let me know.

Microsoft Certifications

WPF Splash Screen

One thing that many people write for their programs is a small dialog that loads up when you start your application. Sometimes this is just an image file and other times it might show you the progress of the app loading, or even something else. Well now WPF applications can have a simple splash screen for free. This only applies to WPF since I tested it with Forms and it did not work at all. Well on to the coding....

Add an image to your project. I added simple.png to my little test app. from there, look at the properties of the image and it will say that the image is a resource. Just change the build action to be SplashScreen and you are done.

There are some down sides with this way of doing a splash screen. You do not get to control it. If you want to have a progress bar or to programatically change the version number, you cannot do it. Ok, I will say that there is no immediate way to do it. I am sure that one of the many smart people out there will be able to do it someday

The second thing is that it is setup to fade out in 0.5 seconds by default. There is no property on the image to allow you to change this. To make it more customizable you will have to set the image back to a resource and then in your App class create an instance of a ScreenSaver class. From this you can set the time to do the fading and the image resource to use. This gives you more flexibility, but still no handle to the dialog.

This should be simple enough for anyone to recreate it. If you want my sample project, just let me know.

This is a nice small start for WPF to get this type of feature. I like the new things that keep coming out for WPF and can't wait for VS2010 to be completed and released.

Shameless plug for Whiteboards Can't Jump (my new iPhone app)!

Apple approved my iPhone application, Whiteboards Can't Jump, today, and I'm pretty excited about it! It's nothing earth-shattering, but developing it kept me busy for a bunch of nights the past two months.

So why am I posting about an iPhone app on a .NET blog? Well, I wrote the app, for one ;-) The biggest reason, though, is because the entire backend service layer of my app is written in C# using WCF. At some point soon I'll outline how it works, but it's a REST API using some of WCF's fun new functionality, hosted on a Windows Server 2008 VPS.

More later, but feel free to check it out if you have an iPhone/iPod Touch! US $1.99 at the App Store. You can find a link to it's iTunes page right on the home page of my website, http://www.chordfusion.com!