Silverlight Is Ready for Business with IdeaBlade DevForce Silverlight

fact sheet Vendor: IdeaBlade (www.ideablade.com) Vendor's Information: About DevForce Silverlight About IdeaBlade

At the recent Mix '09 designer/developer conference, Microsoft unveiled Silverlight 3 with several new features geared towards building line of business applications. These business related improvements include:

• DataForm control – A new and fully customizable control that can be used to auto generate an editable detail view of a record.
• DataGrid control – Updated with new events and row grouping.
• Validation for all data entry controls, such as textboxes, and customizable visual cues for validation errors.

Silverlight 3 Means Business
These new additions are in response to a clear and repeated message given to Microsoft—there's great demand to build line of business applications with Silverlight today.

Silverlight allows you build a centrally hosted internet application in.NET, with UI richness previously only possible with desktop applications. The ability to write cross-platform and cross-browser applications, without the need for multiple code bases or JavaScript, is a clear advantage to web developers who struggle with the rendering intricacies between browsers and platforms and the complexity of JavaScript.

IdeaBlade, a veteran company providing frameworks and tools for enterprise .NET development, has also heard this message and answered by introducing IdeaBlade DevForce Silverlight, available for download and use today with Silverlight 3. DevForce is an n-tier framework used by professional developers to rapidly build robust enterprise-ready applications.

Data Shouldn't Be Hard
With Silverlight's new UI controls, rich display of data and data validation is now easy, but data retrieval and manipulation is still a chore. Using the built-in web services data management mechanism requires the developer to create the server and client plumbing for each query action (select, update, insert, and delete) for each business object. With DevForce, creating a new query action is as easy as writing a one line LINQ query on the client.

DevForce leverages the ADO.NET Entity Framework, Microsoft's premier object-relational mapping framework, for database queries and as a basis to generate business objects from an Entity Data Model (EDM). DevForce supports and seamlessly integrates with Silverlight 3's new line of business controls, such as the DataForm control, and seamlessly hooks into Silverlight's data validation system.

DevForce's Framework builds and adds much more to the mix including:

• Upgrading Entity Framework's two-tier architecture to an enterprise ready scalable n-tier architecture
• The ability to query data using LINQ within the Silverlight client using the exact same business object classes that exist on the server, an easy to maintain "One Model" story.
• Built-in change tracking, easily extendible with business logic
• Client-side caching
• Richer validation support
• Promotes the MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) design Pattern— The forefront application design pattern for building enterprise applications
• Fully unit testable on the client without touching the database

Rapid Development
Building on the mature DevForce platform (DevForce Classic & DevForce WinClient), DevForce Silverlight leverages IdeaBlade's experience in rapid enterprise development by providing robust proven tools such as the "DevForce Object Mapper".

The DevForce Object Mapper is an easy to use graphical tool which maps an entity model to a generated DevForce business object. The object mapper makes tasks such as giving a generated model object a plural or singular name, or choosing whether to use .NET attribute-driven validation, DevForce's own more powerful rules engine, or a combination of both, as easy as a mouse click.

Included in the package is a Visual Studio solution template. This template allows a developer to get a working application that can processes LINQ queries against their own data source in a few minutes.

When the business object is generated on the server, that same business object is linked in the Silverlight client project. With only one model to query and maintain, the developer is freed to write the application rather than the plumbing.

In the following video demonstration from Mix '09, watch as IdeaBlade's Ward Bell, V.P. of Product Management, shows how to build a line of business application using DevForce Silverlight in less than 30 minutes: Microsoft Silverlight Is Ready for Business

Ready Offline and Out of Browser
Silverlight 3 now enables a user to "install" Silverlight applications out of a browser to a Windows or Mac desktop, and optionally run that application disconnected from the Internet. However, what happens when a user tries to query or work with their data offline? DevForce Silverlight is the answer.

When a developer runs a LINQ query on the Silverlight client, DevForce will send it over the net to the Entity Framework using WCF. Retrieved entities are cached on the client so redundant queries can be eliminated, saving bandwidth on the server, allowing the user to quickly query cached data, and allow the application to keep working even when offline! DevForce's architecture makes this powerful scenario easy to implement.

Let explore an example of how DevForce can make this powerful feature a reality:

1. A client application built with DevForce Silverlight retrieves data via queries.
2. The user goes offline—triggering an action on the client application which saves the arbitrary collection of cached entities and graphs into Silverlight's isolated storage.
3. Since the client application uses the same model as the server, the user can query, add, update, and delete records using the same LINQ queries used online against the offline data in isolated storage.
4. When a user comes back online, the changes get synced back to the server!

Built for the Future
DevForce was made to be customizable, transparent, and as loosely coupled as possible. IdeaBlade, a company with a proven 8-year track record of customer support, believes that you should never be boxed in by the tools you use.

Available Now
Previewed by Channel 9 and shown at Mix '09 DevForce Silverlight is already generating buzz:

Experience and Maturity

"IdeaBlade has years of experience building object-relational mapping tools. It has applied that experience to DevForce Silverlight, giving RIA developers the ability to build a rich domain model for their Silverlight application" says Albert Wang, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of IdeaBlade. "With our previous expertise in building n-tier data models combined with our integration with the new Silverlight 3 UI controls and validation, we feel developers have an environment to create powerful enterprise applications using Silverlight."

Data Access Is Hard

In his MIX presentation, Bell proclaims "Silverlight is ready for business application development. All business applications start with data. And managing data has been a challenge for Silverlight developers—until now. " Demonstrating features such as client-side caching, the ability to execute full LINQ statements on the client, offline access, and enhanced validation, DevForce Silverlight provides the missing data pieces to allow developers to manage and move data within the n-tier, asynchronous Silverlight environment.

Credibility

Tim Heuer, Microsoft's Developer Evangelist for Silverlight had this to say about DevForce Silverlight: "After one look at IdeaBlade's solution you'll be amazed how quickly you can create a traditional line of business application with Silverlight, leveraging all the features of the Silverlight platform. I was impressed at how quickly a developer could get started and utilize what they already know in Silverlight and the Entity Framework."

Start developing your Silverlight application today with DevForce Silverlight. Download and try it for free at: http://www.ideablade.com/DevForceSilverlight/DevForceSilverlight_DownloadEditions.aspx

Read More: Make Entity Framework a Reality with IdeaBlade DevForce WinClient »