A few updated points if I may: RE: LINQ Entities / SQL ~~~~~~~~~~~~ This is one of those "it will increase productivity gains*" asterisk moments, in that yeah it can reduce a lot of DAL friction provided you know how the object graphing works under the hood in an intimate fashion much like none you've ever had to before (gets even more hairy when you deal with link tables etc). I have noticed over the years devs tend to into the LINQ to X movement with a sense of innocence and sheer excitement to only come back weeks later bruised, beaten and suffering from what I can only describe is "beaten housewife syndrome" (ie defending the abuse LINQ to X does to the said victim with self-blame ...maybe i don't understand it enough...its my fault it got drunk and beat me...) :)
I personally have thrown in the towel and decided to keep it simple as the productivity gains of using LINQ to SQL / Entities over code maintenance and little tweaks here and there tend to just uppercut me way to much more than not having it... (don't get me started on ADO.NET Data Services as well - aka Astoria). The Data Platform team are in a diff building to the WPF/SL teams and the only time I ever saw these two forces of nature converge into the one spot was via Brad Abram's .NET RIA Services which again is one of those products where its fine to use it out of the box, but the moment you need to go off the reservation you're probably gonna need to reverse engineer everything from LINQ to Entities through to .RIA Service code generation 101.. RE: Eyecandy ~~~~~~~~~~~~ The ability to brand and style an application is intoxicating but it comes with a tax. The tax is you need someone with a design bloodline in the room who can back this promise up and secondly your overlords need to accept there is a learning curve for the said products completion. Most companies are open to this, but every now and then you get a situation where the return on investment for eyecandy isn't always there and its due to a plethora of reasons (late engagement of UX and UI person through to wrestling XAML to the ground espec around binding 101 pitfalls here and there). It does pay off though when you get it right - well for me anyway. RE: Will Silverlight/WPF become 1? ~~~~~~~~~~~~ There was a project called Unity or Harmony forget which, that was goaled on getting the two concepts to meet in the middle. I'm not sure where that's at, but there are rumors of 200+ developers (grin) working on that problem via Scott Guthrie, so i wouldn't hold your breathe personally but it does kinda hint in that space still - espec when the mandate has always been keeping WPF/Silverlight parity in place. I think John Gossman is off hunting down the solution for this, but don't quote me on that. RE: Patient App demo ~~~~~~~~~~~~ To be fair, that app was produced via MCS in Microsoft UK, and it was kind of a proof of concept vision app more so than a "look under the hood" app - same with Woodgrove etc style apps. There def needs to be more of these POC style solutions that not only project the Fantasy User Interface inspiration moments but also show performance gains on how to best crash tackle WPF to the ground. Joseph Cooney is about to unload some tips etc on WPF perf gains here and there. We were just talking about also tags and how it would be cool to get a better cost analysis per tag in terms of usage (ie how much cost in terms of perf does StackPanel vs Grid have etc)... that kind of thing would really be helpful - but i digress, keep an eye out for learnwpf.com update here shortly. RE: Out Of Browser line bluring.. The origins of OOB came from a need to build Offline Video apps more so than it did for poor-mans desktop solution(s) so keep that in mind (ie there was no clear strategy on how far one can go down that rabit whole). I highly doubt Silverlight will go beyond the borders of a plugin, i have dreamed about a snap-on style approach to this where by under the hood you have WPF waiting to bolted onto Silverlight once the user agrees to an elevated trust - sure this could def go into interesting places... but ... that being said the moment you seriously fork Silverlight per Operating System it kind of looses its x-platform, x-device and x-browser agnostic way of life.. The lines here are blurry, but for most LOB apps not having access to the operating system isn't always a problem it becomes a problem when you need to access the I/O level or you run into perf issues and want to unlock the GPU more... Hardware acceleration in a plug-in is very dangerous waters to tread in as even when you don't have a sandbox in place a rogue vendor can send a PC into BSOD.. combine that level of threat to a plugin and the last thing you would want Silverlight known for is BSOD... so its a dicey space to play around in at the best of times. RE: WPF adoption. ~~~~~~~~~~~~ Like I said, WPF has more ubiquity in terms of desktops world wide than Silverlight. Yet data within states it has the lowest developer uptake. Silverlight has less ubiquity on desktops world wide but has more developer uptake? thus the problem we see today around which do you bet on and why... now typically you'll get a "It Depends" response from Microsoft as to call out and say "one vs the other" is a kinda career suicide moment to undertake :) - actually i tell a lie, the official guidance up until October last year was "Use Silverlight, when you hit a wall, go WPF" 70%~ PC's world wide have .NET 3.5+ on it and the cool thing about this number is WPF hasn't got a competitor? ie perfect story for Windows adoption seeding and i think WPF only suffers from a marketing problem - so in saying this, seeding an AppStore model for Windows isn't as crazy as people may think...especially if you can entice the Objective-C app making crowd to consider windows a platform to target as much as iPhone/iPad? Thus we now cross into the merits of HTML5 vs WPF :) hehehehehehe On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 1:12 PM, Alastair Waddell <[email protected]> wrote: > Firstly thanks to all who have contributed to this conversation. I feel > a little better knowing I am not alone - but that still won't solve my > problems. (Current issues are with LINQ to entities not playing nicely) > I guess I have been becoming a little frustrated with the sheer amount > on "New" products available - with a lot of cross over. > > I recall back in the very early .net days I spent time evaluating > remoting and asmx web services. There with the push towards remoting for > inside the network, so I spent the next few months (6+) learning it - > and for the record it worked very well (and from what I understand the > company is still using my code today). But my lord it was painful... > only to be superseded by WCF. > > And then LINQ to SQL, and then LINQ to Entities > > It's very hard to know where to spend time what to learn. Gone are the > days where one can be skilled in all aspects. > > I have been holding off the WPF for a few reasons; > > Most of my work is for corporate - where I am building internal apps > that don't need the reach, but need to play with the OS. I could never > fully understand why there was such a push for Silverlight and not much > for WPF. I figured it was a marketing thing. > > But now with Silverlight 4 those boundaries are now very blurry. > > Will Silverlight and WPF will become 1???? > > I could never understand why there just isn't much adoption. Avalon was > first released over 4 years ago! I do have more confidence now with > VS2010 but still I would have expected more. That said though there may > be lots being corporate walls. > > Most examples are about the eye candy and how cool is this. I really > liked the Patient monitoring app demo, but was really put off when I > installed it and watched my processor jump to 100% when it was full > screen. But that was a few frameworks ago. > > And let's not get into HTML5 v Silverlight 4 debate. > > I will be taking the advice of persevering - I can see the potential and > as was rightly pointed out, I have forgotten how long it took to learn > forms and there is no client pressing me for this particular app - It my > personal learning journey. > > Now if only we could get the internet deleted and start fresh with > relevant and current information - not random posts about beta 1 of > product X it may be easier to find solutions :-) (Date your posts > people) > > > > > Cheers > > Alastair > > > > > > Important Notice > This email contains information which is confidential and intended solely for > the use of the individual or entity to whom it is addressed. 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