Showing posts with label Visual Studio. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Visual Studio. Show all posts
Monday, March 14, 2011
Saturday, January 1, 2011
My End of Season Thoughts……
Another year is going to say good bye to us and its been an eventful year for me. For me, this year started off in the worst possible manner, in the causality of a hospital. Sitting there, I thought it was not a good omen and expected lot of worst things in the days ahead. But to my surprise it turned out to be one of the most interesting time in my life. I ventured in to many new things like blogging, got involved with a technical community, delivered a presentation on WP7 and so on. My blog was up and running this and got over a thousand visitors. A big thank you to all and expects a lot in the coming years also.
Also my long cherished dream of having an SLR was finally fulfilled this year by a friend of mine who bought it from overseas. Then there were a lot of weekend getaways with my friends from college and office. This year also helped me to network with many people from Vijay Raj, an active blogger widely known as msigeek, Janakiraman from MS, Sreeju, Anoop aka AmazedSaint, Jairam, Ramprasanna, again a MS guy who is very familiar these days with this adventures in robotics, Anuraj, Shalvin, Yanesh, Saravana Kumar, Bijith, Safil, Shiju, Satheesh, Saleem and the list goes on. Thanks a lot guys, loved every second spent with you.
Speaking of technology, we experienced an eventful year. We finally the saw the uprising of tablets and smartphones which are poised to dethrone PC’s and laptops in the coming decade.Its that time of year when we take a stock of the developments happened in the past year and here from my perspective the end of the season accolades goes to……
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Hello World App in Silverlight for Windows Phone 7
In this section, I will help you to write the widely used “Hello World” application for the Windows Phone. This may seem little bit silly for hard core programmers and non-programmers like. But here the situation is little bit different, we are going to create and compile app in a pc and is deploying and running it in a mobile device or at least an emulator. According to me this simple code serves two purposes, it will help to understand and how easy is to write a text on to the Windows Phone Screen and secondly, it helps us to experience the process of creating, developing, compiling and running a program without too much difficulties.
I will guide you to write the “Hello World”, in both Silverlight and XNA. In most of the cases you will be using XNA for developing games, but I wanted to show that the functionality can be achieved using both technologies.
For writing your first application you need, Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools, which includes Visual Studio 2010 for Windows Phone, the Windows Phone Emulator and it is a free download from the Microsoft Download Center
Writing the App in Silverlight
Power up Visual Studio 2010 for Windows Phone from Start Menu or from Desktop. From the File Menu select New Project -> Visual C# -> Silverlight for Windows Phone from the installed templates. Then from the middle area, choose Window Phone Application. Enter a Name for the project and also the location, if we don’t want to create a directory for the solution, you can uncheck the Create Directory for the Solution.
After clicking Ok button and project will be created with a lot files, which I will explain latter. You will be welcomed by a large screen of windows phone in portrait mode, to be more precise 480 * 800 pixels by far largest screen to this date in phone world. This is shown in the design view and one can add more controls by dragging and dropping them from the control toolbox. Instead of drag n drop we will write markup for creating the controls. For that we need to switch to markup view and this can be one by clicking any of the icons which may appear to the bottom of your screen.
Saturday, November 27, 2010
What is Windows Phone 7
Microsoft introduced Windows Phone 7 to the public during the Mobile World Congress 2010 @ Barcelona. During the initial stages, MS developed this one as an upgrade to Windows Mobile 6.5, but the developments made by Apple and Google in the mobile arena prompted them to rejig its mobile offering. Then @ MIX 10, they revealed more features and then released the beta toolkit for developers to build applications targeting the Windows Pone platform. As of writing this post the toolkit has been put to gold and RTM version is now available for download from the Microsoft site. The home page for Windows phone is located here and it contains lots of documentation and code samples.
- Snapshot of Windows Phone
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Visual Studio LightSwitch Architecture
What is Visual Studio LightSwitch ?
Visual Studio LightSwitch is a new rapid application development tool from Microsoft for building business applications with less emphasis on coding. It helps to simplify development process, coz it lets you to concentrate on the business logic and does a lot of remaining work for you. LightSwitch applications can be desktop based giving them the ability to interact with hardware devices such as card readers, scanners etc or browser based applications which helps to attain a greater reach. Since LightSwitch applications are created using Silverlight and .Net based n-tier architecture, there will be little change in the look and feel and behavior of both desktop based ones and web based ones.
Visual Studio LightSwitch offers a wide range of pre-built templates and tools to build business application that target Windows Client and Windows Azure. It also helps domain experts to build applications by concentrating on developing business logic, with little focus on writing code. Every business application will have common features such as searching, sorting, rearranging grids, ability to export data etc. With applications developed using LightSwitch these kind of features are already built in. Common data operations such as adding, updating, saving, deleting are also built in and it provides basic validation logic.
Architecture Overview
Most of the business applications are based on n-tier framework and among them the 3-tier architecture is widely used. Typical 3-tier architecture will look like as given below.
The presentation layer is the top most level of the framework, interacts with the end users, ie where the information is captured. It acts as a bridge between the application and the end users. The Business Layer coordinates the application, processes commands, making logical decisions and evaluations, and performs calculations. It also moves and processes data between the two surrounding layers. The Data Layer manages the storage and retrieval of information from data sources such as database or a file system . The information is then passed to the logic tier for processing, and then eventually back to the user. Designing and developing a new 3-tier architecture from scratch is tedious and time consuming. Many factors such as communication between the layers, technology to be used, system design, security etc needs to be factored in. But LightSwitch frees developer from making these decisions by making specific technology choices for you.
In a whole , presentation layer in a LightSwitch application can be a Silverlight 4.0 application, which can run as windows as well as a web application. The data layer can be thought as a set of WCF RIA Domain services running in ASP.NET 4.0 and can be hosted locally or on an IIS Server or in a Windows Azure Web Role. The data layer uses SQL Server or SQL Azure as primary data storage and can consume data from existing SharePoint 2010 lists, databases accessible via EDM provider and custom build WCF RIA Domain Services.
With inputs from Visual Studio Light Switch Team Blog
More resources can be found @
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2010/08/03/announcing-visual-studio-lightswitch.aspx
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