Jeremy Likness

Once again speculation and worry has developers around the world biting their fingers and lamenting the end of a new era. It almost seems developers want to stick a fork in their Silverlight development because so many are latching onto...

If you are trying to follow the hash tag for the //BUILD conference you are probably dizzy by now. I don't blame you for trying to sort through all the messages about standing in line for the toilet or what...

Yesterday I shared my predictions for Windows 8 at the Build conference. Today I can say that the keynote exceeded my expectations. There were a lot of amazing announcements that I'm excited to share with you. First, let's recap my...

Tomorrow is the start of the major event that has been hyped as heralding the most significant changes to Windows in the past 15 years (the last was when Windows 95 was announced). There has been a lot of speculation...

Silverlight is a popular platform for building enterprise applications because of its ease of delivery via the web and consistency across browsers and platforms. Most of the existing guidance is simple with introductory examples and basic content for building applications....

One feature I employ often in Silverlight projects is the ability to share a model between the client and the server. When you expose a model using a WCF service, you can consume it on the Silverlight side and indicate...

One enhancement that quietly slipped into the Silverlight 5 RC is the inclusion of Tasks. This is not the full-blown Task Parallel Library (TPL) to my knowledge (as it lacks the Parallel class and extensions) but it does provide Task,...

It's exciting to see the progress of Silverlight 5 toward the final release that has been slated towards the end of the year. Today, the Silverlight Team announced the release of the Silverlight 5 Release Candidate. While it does not...

There was a great conversation on Twitter today about properties and fields. The discussion was about whether it makes sense to expose variables as fields and not bother with the overhead of properties. After all, it's quick and easy and...

On August 6th I gave a presentation for ReMix South about tablet development with Silverlight. It was a fun presentation to give. I presented using a Motion Computing CL900 to demonstrate the difference between standard applications and ones that are...

I've been using the Silverlight 5 beta for some time now with no issues, so it was a surprise when I came across a project that did not work. It was definitely a backwards compatibility issue because it would run...

I'm not a big fan of attribute-based validation because I find there are often complex requirements that involve asynchronous operations that often break the attribute model. I prefer more fluent validation using rules that can be shared between the client...

Sometimes I love how a little reflection can work magic. In this case I was building what I'll call a "non-intrusive" validation system. The project contains entities that are generated by templates, and it would be extremely difficult to crack...

This is my presentation on Silverlight 5 for Line of Business Applications recorded at CodeStock in 2011.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to present a demo at the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Los Angeles. The session was called "Profiting from the Consumerization of IT with Windows Devices and Windows 7 Enterprise." The focus was on how...

I've seen a lot of speculation around the future of Silverlight and how it compares to HTML5 lately. If you've followed my posts and tweets you'll find that I still believe Silverlight is strong in the line of business area...

I am working on a project that uses a mixed set of assemblies. Some are in the .NET Framework 3.5, and others are in version 4.0. The project is being converted to use the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF). In order...

The parallel tasks library was introduced with the .NET Framework 4.0 and is designed to simplify parallelism and concurrency. The API is very straightforward and usually involves passing in an Action to execute. Things get a little more interesting when...

You've heard plenty about the Sterling database engine on this blog. I recently released version 1.5 which extended the reach of the database and added several feature requests. My article on Sterling for Isolated Storage on Windows Phone 7 was...

You have heard of an elevator pitch, right? It's that quick, 30-second pitch that starts with a hook, goes on to the how, what and why and closes with a strong call to action. It's the perfect way to quickly...

I was at the MIX 2011 event. There was an "Open Source Fest" before the event and I came to showcase the Sterling NoSQL Database project that I run (and code most of, although there have been numerous enhancements and...

A special thanks to everyone who attended my Silverlight 5 for Line of Business Applications talk at CodeStock 2011. It was a great crowd and I enjoyed meeting everyone. As promised, here are the links to the slide deck as...

It's a debate that has existed for decades. The database architects insist that data is golden and the most efficient way to build software is to generate it from the database schema, while the object-oriented code junkies swear that a...

By now you've likely heard the buzz surrounding the release of the Silverlight 5 beta and some of the great new features. Developers have been waiting some time for a dynamic type that can participate in data-binding for Silverlight. Silverlight...

Fluent interfaces make code easier to read, understand, and use. They can also provide a layer of separation and decoupling to make it easier to reuse components in a straightforward fashion. In this post I will walk through the scenario...

The biggest problem with data-binding is the requirement to implement the INotifyPropertyChange interface. There are dozens of solutions out there that try to simplify the process with techniques ranging from parsing lambda expressions and walking the stack frame to using...

While the Sterling NoSQL database supports many items out of the box, there are certain item types it just doesn't know enough about. For example, consider a property defined as IEnumerable. Unlike a list, an enumerable is not bounded. It...

Today I decided to work on some miscellaneous performance optimization tasks for my Sterling NoSQL Database that runs on both Silverlight and Windows Phone 7. The database will serialize any class to any level of depth without you having use...

One exciting new feature of Silverlight 5 is the ability to create custom markup extensions. Markup extensions are a part of XAML. Whenever you see a notation that starts and ends with a brace, you are viewing a markup extension....

Today was an exciting day during what many have dubbed "the real" MIX 2011 keynote. There were announcements about Windows Phone 7, Silverlight, and Kinect. So what were my thoughts sitting in the audience? The awesome community created Windows Phone...

In case you missed it, the release of the Silverlight 5 beta was officially announced at MIX today. Over the next few days in addition to blogging about my experiences at MIX, I'll also be sharing with you some new...

My first day of MIX was an exciting one. I expected the keynote would cover the non-Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 topics so contrary to the reports of "oh no" you'll invariably hear, it only served to stretch my own...

Today's keynote was all about the plug-in free web. The keynote started with a barrage of IE9 statistics and demonstrations showing how "native support" is important. By native support, the team is referring to minimizing the layers between the web...

One common complexity developers face when writing Silverlight applications is the fact that most operations are forced to asynchronous. When using the Asynchronous Programming Model (APM) or an event-driven model, these operations force the developer to consider the "chain of...

I have a few things to cover on this post. I want to start with Silverlight 5 but stay tuned for some information about how you can learn more and ask direct questions about the Sterling database. Silverlight 5 Beta...

Jounce is the result of building composite Silverlight enterprise applications for a variety of verticals since Silverlight 3.0 and finding the common problems that needed to be solved. I found many frameworks to be too heavy for the task and...

I recently had the opportunity to work on a rather nagging issue with a customer related to how Silverlight scales UI elements. The customer was kind enough to approve me posting the solution. The problem is with scaling UI elements...

Even if you don't use Jounce, this post will help you better understand how to create non-shared views and view models with the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF). The architecture I prefer in Silverlight is to keep a shared view and...

This is a quick walkthrough to demonstrate how to make what I call "clean" design-time view models. These are view models that provide design-time data for your application, but don't embed that data in the final product. The release DLL...

This was a busy morning for Jounce. I checked in some changesets that unfortunately break backwards compatibility but address a few highly requested changes. The first was CLS compliance, and that involved refactoring some weirdly named methods. The second was...

I purposefully kept the navigation engine in Jounce light because there are so many opinions about how navigation should work and what makes sense for a specific application. A foundation is provided to raise navigation events and wire view models...

I'm exploring the phone more and more and came across the case of allowing the user to enter digits. One thing to keep in mind on the phone is that the form factor requires approaches to input that are different...

I recently released a new open source project called simply UltraLight.mvvm. The purpose of this project is to make it easier to build MVVM-based applications that support tombstoning (a must) on Windows Phone 7. The DLL is 22KB and the...

The Jounce framework specifically relies on the Managed Extensibility Framework to help solve MVVM concerns. I recently presented an introduction to MEF and explained what I believe are the four core problems it solves: Discovery — it's good to decouple,...

Codestock is an amazing event that I first attended last year in Knoxville, Tennessee. It's hosted at a great venue in a wonderful city and loaded with exciting sessions. I had just as much fun speaking at my session as...

Yesterday I wrote about an ultra light Windows Phone 7 MVVM Framework and mentioned that I would deal with tombstoning in a later post. This is the post. Sterling makes tombstoning very easy because it handles serialization of just about...

I've been doing more work on Windows Phone 7 applications. Because of the smaller footprint of the phone and the way the application is hosted, I don't believe the phone requires the same types of tools and frameworks as the...

In early 2010 I was working on several Silverlight projects that were driven by the need to provide a working offline solution. Isolated storage was the obvious answer. Unfortunately, serializing 10,000 contacts came with some overhead and I realized quickly...

I noticed a project on CodePlex that provides a "JQuery-like syntax" for parsing XAML. It looked interesting, but then I wondered why it would be needed when we have such powerful features available to us in the existing runtime. Silverlight...

It is fairly common to come across the need for a grid that has dynamic columns and I'm surprised that an open source control hasn't yet been implemented to provide this (or maybe it has ... if so, please share...

This evening I presented a talk that dove into the details of Silverlight's Visual State Manager. I enjoyed the talk and had a terrific crowd with some very good questions. The deck explains much of what I went into with...

One of the most common questions I get about Jounce is how to handle transitions, since the ContentControl immediately swaps out content. There are some third-party solutions, such as the TransitioningContentControl from the Silverlight toolkit, but Jounce can also handle...

Sterling changeset 72063 [browse the source code here] introduces triggers. The trigger is a powerful feature that allows you to universally intercept database operations. Their application in Sterling resolves several concerns, including: Validation — prevent a save operation from succeeding...

One popular feature in the widely used Prism Framework is the concept of "modules." A prism module is a functional unit that represents a set of related concerns. These concerns can be coded and tested independently and then composed into...

I normally focus on very technical posts with a lot of code. Recently, I've been asked a few questions and had some interesting conversations that prompted this more philosophical post. I'd like to take a step back and look at...

Sterling is an object-oriented database that I created to facilitate ease of serialization of data in both Silverlight 4 (soon 5) and Windows Phone 7 projects. Sterling was designed with a few goals in mind. It is not a true...

This will be a shorter bit for an interesting topic. I've noticed a few posts and discussion around raising the property changed notification. This continues to be the sore spot for MVVM. It creates quite a bit of ceremony for...

I thought it might be useful for users (and potential users) of Jounce, MVVM, and Silverlight in general if I were to show the full process of building an application. When people ask me about how complicated MVVM is, I...

In the third part of this series I wanted to cover the "3D Panel" effect you can see on my Projects page. While there are some terrific third-party carousel controls, I wanted to see what it takes to build one...

This is the second part in the post of more "fun" effects and challenges I worked through in Silverlight when building my personal web page. One effect I really wanted to work out is the Matrix-style effect you can see...

Recently I undertook the effort to rewrite my personal web page for a few reasons. I always like side projects for learning so I wanted to explore some "fun" ideas such as three dimensional objects and plasma (I blogged about...

This weekend I was working a little bit on my personal web site (rewriting it again, to use some better themes and my Jounce framework) and decided it would be fun to tinker with some old school effects. I decided...

It seems that I've become very familiar with this command: xsd /c /l:cs schema.xml If you're not familiar with it, this allows you to parse a schema into a strongly typed class, which then allows you to deserialize an XML...

Silverlight 5 is coming! According to the keynote from Scott Guthrie, it will be here in beta by Spring 2011 and in release by end of year 2011. Today's Silverlight Firestarter event included a keynote speech by Scott Guthrie, announcing...

I've blogged several times about how I like to handle services in Silverlight. For two key posts, take a look at: Abstracting Service Calls in Silverlight 3 (works well for 4, too) Simplifying Asynchronous Calls in Silverlight using Action In...

Line of business applications are full of what we call "CRUD" screens for Create, Read, Update, and Delete. Jounce addresses common concerns that are found in these types of transactions: Is Dirty and Commit It is common to check the...

I knocked out quite a few items for the next release of Jounce, the primary being explicit support for multiple views bound to the same view model. In the previous version, the visual state binding would only reflect the most...

Sometimes it makes sense to have multiple types of views contained within a list or region. In WPF, a data template selector can help determine which template is used based on the data template, allowing a container to mix different...

One common request I get is how Jounce can work with the Navigation Framework. My first reply is always, "Why do you want to use that?" As you can see in previous posts, the Jounce navigation works perfectly fine with...

This weekend was a wild ride with speculation about the future of Silverlight and whether or not Microsoft was abandoning it. It produced a lot of misinformation as anti-Silverlight zealots proclaimed its official demise with a smattering of "I told...

Perception is said to be reality and there has been a lot of speculation recently about where Silverlight is going and what Microsoft's position is. One of the reasons for this is the emphasis on HTML5 at the recent PDC...

Now that we've explored the concept of Jounce navigation, the next logical step is to examine region management. This concept was introduced by the Prism framework and is very powerful and functional for both WPF and Silverlight applications. Region management...

Navigation is always an interesting topic and something I often see people struggle with in Silverlight applications. I am not a fan of navigation methods that force you to change the way your views behave, which is why I am...

In this second installment about the Jounce framework, I'll share how to get started with Jounce and wire your first view bound to a view model. The Jounce project is available online at http://Jounce.Codeplex.com. Jounce injects itself as a service...

It seems like ages ago when I was trying to decide how to take a mobile device management application to the next level. The product provided a very rich and detailed web-based interface that was designed to look and feel...

Over the next few weeks I will be publishing a series of posts explaining the open source Jounce project that I just released. Jounce provides guidance for building modular Silverlight applications using the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) and Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM)....

After having worked on several major projects that integrated the Managed Extensibility Framework, I thought it might be beneficial to share a retrospective on how it was used what value it provided. These are all ways MEF helped my team...

Thanks to everyone who joined me last night for my presentation about Model-View-ViewModel for the Atlanta Silverlight Meetup group. I enjoyed it and appreciate you sticking through the heat (pardon the pun). As promised, I've uploaded both the slide deck...

When building large Silverlight applications, it makes sense to build sets of styles that can be shared across the application. Many examples on the web illustrate placing these in the App.xaml file and then you are off to the races....

The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is a very powerful tool for building modular, extensible Silverlight applications. If you've followed this blog, you'll know that it is not just for applications that anticipate plug-ins, but can be used as an inversion...

The Problem A common UI pattern is to expose text in a read-only container, then swap it for an editable input box based on a command. There are multiple approaches to doing this (including just changing the style of the...

Published another quickstart. This is an introductory quickstart for the Managed Extensibility Framework, and is similar to the previous one except that it is specific to Silverlight. You can take a look at the article and watch the short video...

Validation is a topic that comes up quite frequently. One concern is how to honor DRY (don't repeat yourself) principles and create a framework that is reusable across layers. There are some very robust and tested frameworks out there, but...

I've been working with the Reactive Extensions (Rx) library quite a bit lately and am very impressed. While it is a new way of thinking about services, it certainly makes life much easier. In this example, I'll show you a...

I've been working on quickstarts for a community team that I'm a member of. The team is called MEFContrib. We write extensions to the Managed Extensibility Framework as well as supporting manuals and documentation. I've been tasked with the quickstarts...

View models can expose commands that are bound to controls. Commands encapsulate an action and a permission, and the advantage to binding is that controls that support commands will automatically disable when the command cannot execute. Commands can also be...

In an interview earlier this year with MSDN geekSpeak, I discussed unit testing for Silverlight and some of the frameworks that are available. One audience member raised a very important question: "How do we test the XAML?" Specifically, what happens...

Reactive Extensions (Rx) is a product from Microsoft Research that simplifies the management and composition of asynchronous events. If you read my earlier post on Asynchronous Workflows, you'll understand why the asynchronous programming model can sometimes lead to confusing and...

One popular gripe about Silverlight has been the lack of integrated testing tools. There are several types of tests you may perform against a software project. Unit tests can be performed with the aid of the Silverlight Unit Testing Framework...

It is very common to have base classes and interfaces that use generic types to define standard behaviors across business applications. One challenge with the Managed Extensibility Framework is that it doesn't directly support generic exports and imports: in other...

I'm please to share that I released the alpha version of the Sterling Object-Oriented Database for Silverlight 4.0 and Windows Phone 7.0 applications today. I dug into more details about the project in this introductory post. There have not been...

After posting about profiling Silverlight 4 out of the box, the author of a tool was kind enough to share with me his free .NET profiling tool. It's free, and it does a lot more than Silverlight. The manual is...

It turns out you can profile Silverlight 4 applications. Really! But the steps are scattered about the web in bits and pieces, so I wrote this to pull them all together. I'm going to use my reference X-Fit application for...

I was very excited to see two of my blog posts featured in the 900th issue of Silverlight Cream which ranked the top articles of 2010 thus far. These were Top 10 Silverlight Myths and Facts to Bust Them (#4)...

Today, I'm excited to share a project that I've been working on for some time now. The project, called Sterling (for Sterling Silverlight, of course!) is a very light weight approach to handling serialization and deserialization to and from isolated...

In my experience working with Silverlight applications, probably one of the most underused features I've witnessed is the ability to abstract application-level functionality using the IApplicationService and IApplicationLifetimeAware interfaces. This, in turn, results in the over-use (and abuse) of the...

By now, you probably are aware that you can dynamically load XAP files using the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) within your Silverlight applications. Have you been scratching your head, however, and wondering how on earth you would actually test something...

OK, so it's not exactly "out of the box" but the most recent PRISM 4.0 Drop (drop 2) seems to contain something Silverlight developers have been begging for ... for quite some time. It's buried within the "QuickStart" folder under...

As a WPF or Silverlight developer, you know that your models must implement INotifyPropertyChanged and it can be a pain. To do it safely, you really need to check to see if there are any registered handlers, then raise the...