Aspen – A sample app using Silverlight 4 and .Net 4.0 – part 1 of X

Together with Dag König and Danwei Tran at Microsoft, I’m building an app with the code name “Aspen”. This application will use most of the new features shipped with Visual Studio 2010, such as, Silverlight 4, Entity Framework 4, MEF, WCF RIA Services etc. We are going to use the MVVM pattern and a sort of Domain Driven Design (DDD) approach. Danwei is the GUI designer, she will use Sketchflow and Expression Blend 4. Dag König is the “Standards authority” and  will also do some development. My part is to be a developer, both backend and client-side. I will blog about our progress on my blog and that is the reason for the X in the title of this blog post. I don’t know how many parts it will be ;)


The goal of the application


The application should be a reference application and will have the following goals:

A Reference application for Silverlgiht 4, .NET 4.0 and WCF RIA Services.

Able to demonstrate several different techniques named above and Entity Framework etc.

This application will be available on CodePlex so everyone can download it.


Description of the application

 

We will use the code name “Aspen” during the development, only to be cool ;) The application is for small companies that doesn’t have afford to buy an advanced system for handling members. With “Aspen” we want to create a simple one to handle the basic functionality. The application should be easy to access and install, only Silverlight should be needed. The application will have different function such as creating a member, a member can belong to different groups. Every group can have gatherings. On those gatherings the members can decide if they want to join or not. The Domain model for this application will be kind of simple, at the moment it will only have three Entities, Member, Group and Gathering. We will later add more functionality, but we have to start somewhere.

My next blog post will be about some MEF and Entity Framework 4 code-only feature..

4 Comments

  • hello!
    Looks inetersting. But, why you do not use WCF Data Services? It is a cool techonology and, in my opinion, a better choice for many scenarios.

    thanks,
    S.


  • @slavof:
    We could have used WCF Data Services, but Dag and I are going to use this application on a conferance (SDC 2010), and I'm going to talk about WCF RIA Services and Dag is going to talk about the new features within Silverlight 4.0. So that is the reason why we want to include WCF RIA Services.

  • Hope you this project will include example of how to use stored procedure. As EF use complextype for the result of SP, but WCF RIA services and silverlight don't support complextype yet, so I really want to a good example how to use SP for SL App, even not for only display data, but for all CRUD

  • In one context would you prefer WCF Data over WCF RIA?

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