Wow. Friday 20^th of March and MSDN Live Winter 2009 is now history. I delivered my last two talks on Silverlight during this round of MSDN Live in Oslo yesterday. Over the last two and a half week the MSDN Live road-show have visited Stavanger, Bergen, Trondheim and Oslo. It has been a great experience, and I’ve gotten to meet some interesting developers around the country. It has been great to hear how many people are starting to adopt Silverlight and WPF for their rich client applications, and I’m certain this trend is only going to continue.

As promised this blog post contains links to the Dive Log example application (which will be updated to Silverlight 3 shortly), as well as links to more information relevant to the two sessions I gave during MSDN Live. I’ve also included a Flickr Photomentury by Rune Grothaug showing a full day of MSDN Live.

Model-View-ViewModel

My first talk at MSDN was about building business focused applications using Silverlight 2. Throughout the talk I demonstrated how the MVVM pattern can help you achieve separation of concerns, and thus giving you more flexible, testable and designer friendly code. Some links to more information:

• YouCard Re-visited: Implementing the ViewModel pattern
  One of the first posts I wrote about the MVVM pattern, describing how I refactored my YouCard example application from REMIX to follow this patterns
  
• YouCard Re-visited: Implementing Dependency Injection in Silverlight
  A follow-up post showing how to use Dependency Injection and IoC in a Silverlight context, and how it can support the MVVM pattern.
  
• Combining different Separated Presentation Patterns
  Not everything can be achieved through data binding and commands. In some cases you need to have more access to UI specific events, for instance to implement drag-and-drop behavior in your application. This post describes how you can combine multiple UI patterns in one application. In the concrete example I combine the MVVM pattern with a Supervising Controller to implement drag-and-drop in a example application.
  
• WPF Apps With The Model-View-ViewModel Design Pattern
  A great MSDN Magazine article by Josh Smith discussing the MVVM pattern in a WPF context.
  
• Model-View-ViewModel In Silverlight 2 Apps
  A great MSDN Magazine article by Shawn Wildermuth discussing the MVVM pattern in a Silverlight context.
  
• My delicious.com favorites tagged with MVVM

Silverlight Tips & Tricks

My second talk at MSDN was 6 different Silverlight Tips & Tricks showing how to solve some of the not-so-obvious problems in Silverlight.

• Recompressing the XAP file to save download size
  A Silverlight XAP file is just a standard ZIP file. By recompressing it with you can save up to 25% download size. During my talk I demonstrated the ReXapper tool, which can be easily integrated to your project as a post-build command.
  
• Deep linking in Silverlight applications
  Linking is a core concept of the web. With Rich Internet Applications in AJAX, Silverlight and Flash this becomes a challenge, as we no longer have different pages for each piece of information or screen in the application. Instead we load the application once, and then dynamically load pieces of information without navigating to a new page. This breaks the concept of linking, booking marking and back/forward navigation in the browser. To solve this we need to manually manage history state. In my blog post I use ASP.NET AJAX to solve this. Robby Ingebretsen has another approach using jQuery to manage the browser history.
  
• Printing in Silverlight
  Silverlight looks great on screen but does not have a good print story. Printing in Silverlight can be solved by opening a new window showing a server-side rendered report, or you can use the HTML Bridge to generate a client side report.
  
• Testing in Silverlight
  • Unit Testing with Silverlight 2 by Jeff Wilcox
    Jeff is the primary developer on the Silverlight testing framework, and this is probably the best introduction to Silverlight Unit Testing.
  • Unit testing templates for Microsoft Silverlight 2 Beta 2
    To make things easier Jeff has prepared a Visual Studio template to set up Silverlight Unit Testing.
  • What’s in the pipeline for Silverlight Test Developers
    Jeff hints about what might come in the next version of the Silverlight testing framework.
  • Unit Testing Asynchronous Code in Silverlight
    This is a post I did back in June describing how to use the Asynchronous attribute, and how to write asynchronous tests in Silverlight.
  • Silverlight NUnit Projects
    Jamie Cansdale explains how to use NUnit to do Silverlight testing. The benefit of using NUnit is that you can run your tests outside the browser, execute the tests from TestDriven.Net, and even get code coverage. For integration testing (network, browser integration) you still need to use the Silverlight Testing Framework from Microsoft.

Hopefully you enjoyed this round of MSDN Live and got a good introduction on how to build Silverlight 2 applications. If you have any questions related to the presentations feel free to post them in the comments section. The code and slides are available as downloads from my SkyDrive (embedded in the blog post).