John Papa

Silverlight, MVVM, Prism and More at VSLive Orlando

John Papa -

Are you planning on attending VSLive Orlando this week? If so, please stop by the 3 sessions I will be presenting at VSLive Orlando and say hi. I really enjoy speaking at the conferences and getting the chance to have great conversations with all the people. Often it gives me a greater breadth of understanding of what people are trying to accomplish and the struggles they face. For me the conferences have always been about the conversations and the people.

If you are going to be at the conference ping me on Twitter.

So this week I will be presenting 3 interesting and timely topics:

Building medium to large scale practical applications in Silverlight requires just as much planning as developing with WPF, ASP.NET or WinForms. It is important to account for testability, scalability and modularity. Using the Model-View-ViewModel pattern (MVVM) with Silverlight is ideal for breaking out separation of concerns. Prism 2 helps facilitate this development with MVVM in Silverlight, while including key aspects for modularity. The Unity library is excellent for including Dependency Injection in Silverlight applications and for increasing both testability and modularity. This session will explain how to plan for and build real world business applications with Silverlight using Prism, Unity, and MVVM to achieve these goals.


This session will demonstrate how XAML based data binding works with Silverlight 3 including the exploration of dependency properties. Demonstrations will be given in both Expression Blend and Visual Studio to show how to manage contextual bindings through declarative and explicit coding techniques. We will walk through examples of binding modes, list based bindings, type converters, notifications, and ObservableCollection implementations.

The Entity Framework can be used to architect applications against a conceptual model that is mapped to the logic model. The Entity Framework has many components including EntityClient, Entity SQL, Object Services, the Entity Data Model and LINQ to Entities. This session will discuss the architecture of the Entity Framework and explain the roles of each of its different components. I will also demonstrate how to write queries using the different options as well as how to evaluate which options within Object Services to use or if to use the EntityClient provider directly.