Silverlight Futures from the PDC08 Conference

This is about Alexandria.  Not ready for prime time, but man, we need this bad.

The presentation is about silverlight business applications.  Some of the things that are demonstrated for today include WCF service creation, Entity framework data tier.  Then we get into the future of business application development with Silverlight.  

How about a Business Logic Class for ADO.Net Entity added - this gives the Silverlight application access to the data from the data layer.  Magic?  You can just add a reference and all is available to you in your silverlight application.  

I just spent the weekend working through communication issues including serialization and syncronizing business objects between a Silverlight application and the Web server app.  It seems to me that if I had access to production quality code such as this Alexandria project that I could have spent my weekend building out functionality that the user would actually SEE.

So why the heck am I messing around with all the code gen and all the compression and crap I'm doing for the EZBERP app..........!   Best answer I have is that this code isn't here, and I am.  I need my app now.

Two other pieces of Silverlight functionality that were shown which I have spent time on.  

• 1. How to handle the need for multiple pages in your silverlight application?  They've baked a concept involving a frame control.  Frames for multiple page applications?  These frames shown in the demo support BACKBUTTON NATIVELY.  

HERE I go again, I just spent all that energy on these very same problems.  My stuff works, but heck!  Time is more precious than gold.

• Login too, the login is right there.

I'll keep working on my stuff because I have no choice - but at least knowing about these pieces will enable me to plan for their eventual incorporation into my project - which will probably change the way I structure things.

I don't know.