Contrary to popular opinion, rich application development is not dead. Desktop and rich application development has been around for many years now and we see no end for that style. This issue covers a number of rich application development tools including Silverlight, The Code Framework and Windows 8. Enjoy!
I give up! I can’t really explain how the cloud works unless I cover the topic of authentication in the cloud first. If I didn’t tackle this topic first, I could only explain boring unauthenticated applications. The issue is, for all practical purposes the authentication fit for the cloud is claims based. There is no worldwide active directory you can rely on. There is no single aspnetdb.mdf database. What’s more, there are many kinds of authentications already - Facebook, Twitter, Google, OpenID, Windows Live ID, etc.
The next version of Silverlight should be available by the time you read this article. The Silverlight team has followed a fast pace during the last few years, producing four versions of their framework in only thirty months. Each new version of Silverlight has been full of surprises and useful features. Version 5 is no different. Let’s look as some of the best features available in SL 5
The newest member of the jQuery family of projects is jQuery Mobile. A good way to describe what jQuery Mobile is to think of it as jQuery UI for mobile devices. If you have wanted to write mobile-optimized UIs over your applications, jQuery Mobile is a library that you will want to add to your bag of tricks. Like jQuery UI, jQuery Mobile is themeable. This article makes two assumptions. First, you are familiar with jQuery and second, you are familiar with jQuery UI. If you are not familiar with jQuery or jQuery UI, I suggest that you take a moment to familiarize yourself with those libraries. Fortunately, the websites for these projects (jquery.com and jQueryUI.com respectively) are replete with comprehensive documentation and code examples. jQuery Mobile is no different. The official website for jQuery Mobile is jquerymobile.com. As of this writing, jQuery Mobile 1.0 Beta 3 has been released. Its beta status notwithstanding, jQuery Mobile is ready for primetime and has been incorporated into many applications already. In this article, I will cover what you need to get started with some simple examples that illustrate how to create one page and multi-page apps. In addition, I’ll touch upon the theming capabilities in jQuery Mobile.
Developing for Windows Phone is easy if you have been doing any XAML at all. That’s because you use Silverlight for Windows Phone development.
The CODE Framework is an open-source application framework by the makers of CODE Magazine. It is entirely free of charge. It covers a wide range of features that can be applied altogether or individually in an À la carte fashion. All of these features revolve around a single concept: Building advanced business applications in a productive and maintainable fashion while maintaining great application architecture. In this article, we are focusing on a subset of the CODE Framework, specifically the components used to build WPF applications using the MVVM and MVC patterns.
To use a music analogy, many installments of “The Baker’s Dozen” have been like “concept albums,” where most or all of the tips work towards a big picture. Then there are times where I present a series of random tips that are largely standalone and don’t form a pattern. In this article, I’m going to present 13 random tips for SQL Server and T-SQL programming.
As readers of this magazine, you are all experts at certain facets of software development, be it for the desktop, the web, SQL Server and now mobile platforms. Mobile programming was a fairly arcane development arena up until the recent announcement of Windows Phone 7 (WP7). Prior to WP7, you had to become intimately familiar with the myriad platforms and form factors available and write your programs to each of those phones. With the advent of WP7, Microsoft is now controlling the hardware capabilities of the phone making it much easier to develop for these platforms. You can now also leverage existing skills in Silverlight and XNA to write your apps. But the question always remains: how do I get started and what is the best way to write for the new WP7? In a previous article, <i>CODE Magazine </i>Jan/Feb 2011, I showed you what to do to get started; now I want to show you the best way to apply what you have learned in that article. I will use Silverlight, the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern, and Silverlight Unit testing to build a sample app.