I've been trying to find a good advanced Silverlight 4 course, but can't really find anything. I've found this:
http://www.develop.com/training-course/silverlight-4
But the most interesting topics are only talked about in the course material, not in the actual course. The extra topics from this course which is of particular interest, are:
Working with Files: local files, Isolated Storage, data files, zip files.
Extensibility: working with MEF to build extensible applications
PRISM: using PRISM (Composite Application Guidance) to structure Silverlight applications
Also: Test driven development with Silverlight would be good to learn better.
Does anyone know anyone who gives good courses which include these topics? I'm not a total Silverlight newbie, but not an expert either. Preferably the course will be held in Europe or Eastern USA.
Chr.
Agilitrain offers an advanced course. Check out https://agilitrain.com/. This is the company that offers the "Silverlight Tour" courses. I haven't been to any of their offerings, but the instructors are well known in the Silverlight arena. (Shawn Wildermuth and Erik Mork are two of them.)
Take a look at the web site. They display full course outlines and bios of the instructors.
The prices (as with any course) are hefty for an independent programmer/consultant, but if you have a corporation footing the bill, the prices seem a bit more competitive.
Here's a good resource for MEF and Prism: http://development-guides.silverbaylabs.org/
Erik provides some really useful videos explaining the topics. Not exactly a course per se though.
And here is Channel9's collection of Silverlight 4 training courses: http://development-guides.silverbaylabs.org/
There's at least one covering MEF.
The following is a link to ScottGu's blog. This is another collection of pretty useful Silverlight 4 training videos: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/04/22/silverlight-4-training-kit.aspx
That should be a good start. :)
Related
We have been using ReqPro to a great extent by taking the advantage of the API DLLs. We basically develop .NET application and used the DLLs to store data to the ReqPro projects with great ease.
Now, we are looking at possible ways to move to RRC. For this, we need to know how we can achieve the same features.
As RRC is web based, it might have some services that can be used for such things.
The basic requirements are inserting requirements, traceabilities, history etc to RRC and retrieving the same.
Back to top
Please take a look at OSLC - this is a REST-based interface to RRC that will allow you to access and write to RRC. It may not cover all the capabilities you require - but should be a good start. http://open-services.net/ - and then look at the RM specification.
Hope that helps
anthony
p.s Another good place to cross-post this question is the forums on jazz.net - there is a specific forum for RRC.
Can anybody refer any resource where i can learn advanced silverlight concepts like creating complex custom controls or any of other advanced concepts? If any book is available then also please mention.
Thanks in advance :)
Silverlight 4 in action which comes from Pete Brown who works at Microsoft.
You can never go wrong by heading directly to the Silverlight site which has a learning section specifically geared towards coming up to speed with Silverlight, advanced topics as well.
If you reside in a state where the SL tour comes to town and have the available funding; you could get an intense 3 day course on varying SL4 concepts. It is put on by Shawn Wildermuth who is fairly prevalent in the SL community.
Erik Mork via Silver Bay Labs provides varying videos which touch on a range of topics and have proven beneficial to me in varying scenarios.
Silverlight is a sub-set of WPF, so try looking for WPF programming tips!
I posted this community wiki in the hopes of creating a thread of expertise. My question is thus ... "Where do the experts go to learn about the newest coding techniques?".
I'm basically looking for the leading/bleeding edge of architecture, design, development and theory.
I know conferences and trade shows are probably the best venues to see the latest and greatest, but for those on a limited budget (of both time and money) such as myself, I'm looking for websites that I can read in the evenings that will keep me current on what's new in the world.
I program mostly in C# but the websites need not be geared towards C#.
Blogs
Martin Fowler, the best starting point I think. (http://martinfowler.com/)
articles like "Consumer-Driven Contracts: A Service Evolution Pattern", "Mocks Aren't Stubs", "Inversion of Control Containers and the Dependency Injection pattern" (http://martinfowler.com/articles.html)
David Hayden (http://www.davidhayden.com/)
Reflective Perspective, a good daily feed (http://blog.cwa.me.uk/tags/morning-brew/)
Ayende (http://ayende.com/Blog/)
Eric Lippert - Works on the language. Sometimes read about new C# features before they're announced elsewhere.
Scott Hanselman
Journals
The Architecture Journal (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/bb410935.aspx) And what's a great option - you can order free, paper based copies!
MSDN Magazine (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/default.aspx)
Community
Codeproject.com, short and large articles
pnpguidance.com, tutorials, blogs and articles
Real applications and devteams
pattern&practices home: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/practices/default.aspx, and P&P products
SCSF, the Smart Client Software Factory home. Learn about desktop enterprise systems. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480482.aspx)
WCSF, the Web Client Software Factory home. Learn about busines(process) oriented web architecures. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb264518.aspx)
Enterprise Library
For free - I would recommend MSDN, particularly keep an eye on the C# and .NET technology pages. Lots of blogs, and nearly every announcements about what's up and coming is put there.
Serverside.net
The ondemand(previously recorded) webcasts from Microsoft are normally really good, but it's a painful number of clicks to actually get to the point where you can download the file, and sometimes you find that it is not available.
Also sometimes you can find a .NET User Group locally that will have speakers/sessions occasionally. These are also great ways to network and find out what kind of work is going on in your area.
Books, books, books! Good books are written by subject matter expects, involve input from many sources, are peer reviewed, well structured and go orders of magnitude deeper than trade shows, and most online material. When you buy a book, you get the experience of an expert for a very reasonable price.
NDepend documentation comes with two white books and also online blog posts and articles concerning the architecture for large .NET application:
Partitioning code base through .NET assemblies and Visual Studio projects (8 pages)
Defining .NET Components with Namespaces (7 pages)
Control Components Dependencies to gain Clean Architecture
Re-factoring, Re-Structuring and the cost of Levelizing
Evolutionary Design and Acyclic componentization
Layering, the Level metric and the Discourse of Method
Fighting Fabricated Complexity
I never get to go to PDC, but I do love to watch the videos.
As a previous post mentioned the MS PDC videos are on online. Same with Mix which has good MS Web development related content. Also, for general MS videos there is Channel 9, it's not all technical content, but it's worth searching if you are looking for something in particular.
Someone already mentioned blogs, here are a few more:
Scott Hansleman - lots of stuff on there, a lot of ASP, MVC stuff.
Phil Haack - another good MVC guy.
Rob Connery - again a lot of focus on MVC.
ScottGu - according to his blog he "builds a few products for Microsoft", which has to be the understatment of the year - he is in charge of ASP, IIS, SIlverlight and much more besides at MS.
Check out Sharp Architecture, it's very promising.
I've collected several RSS feeds that I regularly to stay up-to-date on .NET and Agile. If you like I can share the list with you. It contains most of the stuff already mentioned here.
There are a couple of questions on Stackoverflow asking whether x (Ruby / Drupal) technology is 'enterprise ready'.
I would like to ask how is 'enterprise ready' defined.
Has anyone created their own checklist?
Does anyone have a benchmark that they test against?
"Enterprise Ready" for the most part means can we run it reliably and effectively within a large organisation.
There are several factors involved:
Is it reliable?
Can our current staff support it, or do we need specialists?
Can it fit in with our established security model?
Can deployments be done with our automated tools?
How easy is it to administer? Can the business users do it or do we need a specialist?
If it uses a database, is it our standard DB, or do we need to train up more specialists?
Depending on how important the system is to the business the following question might also apply:
Can it be made highly available?
Can it be load balanced?
Is it secure enough?
Open Source projects often do not pay enough attention to the difficulties of deploying and running software within a large organisation. e.g. Most OS projects default to MySql as the database, which is a good and sensible choice for most small projects, however, if your Enterprise has an ORACLE site license and a team of highly skilled ORACLE DBAs in place the MySql option looks distinctly unattractive.
To be short:
"Enterprise ready" means: If it crashes, the enterprises using it will possibly sue you.
Most of the time the "test", if it may really be called as such, is that some enterprise (=large business), has deployed a successful and stable product using it. So its more like saying its proven its worth on the battlefield, or something like that. In other words the framework has been used successfully, or not in the real world, you can't just follow some checklist and load tests and say its enterprise ready.
Like Robert Gould says in his answer, it's "Enterprise-ready" when it's been proven by some other huge project. I'd put it this way: if somebody out there has made millions of dollars with it and gotten written up by venture capitalist magazines as the year's (some year, not necessarily this one) hottest new thing, then it's Enterprise-ready. :)
Another way to look at the question is that a tech is Enterprise-ready when a non-tech boss or business owner won't worry about whether or not they've chosen a good platform to run their business on. In this sense Enterprise-ready is a measure of brand recognition rather than technological maturity.
Having built a couple "Enterprise" applications...
Enterprise outside of development means, that if it breaks, someone can fix it. I've worked with employers/contractors that stick with quite possibly the worst managing hosting providers, data vendors, or such because they will fix problems when they crop up, even if they crop up a lot it, and have someone to call when they break.
So to restate it another way, Enterprise software is Enterprisey because it has support options available. A simple example: jQuery isn't enterprisey while ExtJS is, because ExtJS has a corporate support structure to it. (Yes I know these two frameworks is like comparing a toolset to a factory manufactured home kit ).
As my day job is all about enterprise architecture, I believe that the word enterprise isn't nowadays about size nor scale but refers more to how a software product is sold.
For example, Ruby on Rails isn't enterprise because there is no vendor that will come into your shop and do Powerpoint presentations repeatedly for the developer community. Ruby on Rails doesn't have a sales executive that takes me out to the golf course or my favorite restaurant for lunch. Ruby on Rails also isn't deeply covered by industry analyst firms such as Gartner.
Ruby on Rails will never be considered "enterprise" until these things occur...
From my experience, "Enterprise ready" label is an indicator of the fear of managers to adopt an open-source technology, possibly balanced with a desire not to stay follower in that technology.
This may objectively argued with considerations such as support from a third party company or integration in existing development tools.
I suppose an application could be considered "enterprise ready" when it is stable enough that a large company would use it. It would also imply some level of support, so when it does inevitable break.
Wether or not something is "enterprise ready" is entirely subjective, and undefined, and rather "buzz word'y".. Basically, you can't have a test_isEnterpriseReady() - just make your application as reliable and efficient as it can be..
A similar question has been asked: MSDN subscriptions on the cheap?, but I am not interested in the solutions provided:
I am not developing a product for sale, I am starting up a consulting company, so Empower is not an option.
I have visited the links to MS regarding MSDN subscriptions and they do not point to a way to get an inexpensive copy.
I am not interested in suggestions that I become a MVP. Frankly, I'm desiring to focus on developing my company, not jumping through MS's hoops.
There are really only a few options available
Buy it at standard price
Become a Microsoft Certified Partner, and get a good discount (Actually much simpler than you would think, I did it in under 2 weeks for my business)
Find a MVP buddy that is willing to share a free giveaway
But in all reality, these are the ONLY legal options. You might also try calling Microsoft, you never know what might happen, they have many special programs that are not necessarily publicly advertised.
What you want is the Action Pack: https://partner.microsoft.com/US/40016455.
(Note, as an employee of Microsoft, I apologize that you have to LOG OUT of your LiveID to see this page if that LiveID is not already attached to a Registered Partner.)
You don't have to be certified to get access to this, just registered (there are three levels of partnership: 1. Registered, 2. Certified, 3. Gold Certified). You do have to pass a fairly simple assessment test, though.
See the pdf referenced at https://partner.microsoft.com/US/40082823 for an overview of the process.
One last thing - if you are a student (I suspect the OP is not), you can get many Microsoft tools free from http://www.dreamspark.com.
Surely your consultancy will need a website in ASP.NET and perhaps your clients would like a widget that talks directly to a web service on your site? There's your product.
Also, look into "Value added Services" amongst the Empower documentation.
I'm on the Empower program - there really aren't any barriers to entry, as such.
I used to go directly through MS, but nowadays, I always order mine through Xtras.net - they have good multi-year discounts and you manage the subscription online through Microsoft's site as normal.
Does Empower require that the 'main' use is developing a product?
You can always develop a product as well - doesn't have to be very sucessfull, perhaps something to display the time in a window?