We love playing with new technology and strive to stay on top of the latest and greatest. We also regularly attend industry events and user groups such as FOTB, Droidcon, 360Flex, DDD, NxtGen and LFPUG and always looking for the next great event.

You’ll get to work with the likes of me, @andreablack, @peterkeating and @colinl along with occasional input from great talents such as @nwebb, @getrichhull, @amw7 and others to help us build world class RIAs.

We get all sorts of interesting projects ranging from sales tools for one of the worlds largest toy manufacturers to really cool audio slow-downers to help people learn to play music. We like to consider ourselves ‘platform agnostic’ which means we don’t get caught up in the “my tech is better than your tech” arguments. We focus on learning as much as possible and using the best tool for the job. This is great fun for us, we don’t get stuck using the same old technology and means our clients get a better result from experienced and unbiased opinion.

If you’re a developer with good OOP experience, familiarity with Flex and/or .Net and a genuine passion for building amazing user experiences and writing great code why not check out our openings and drop us your CV/portfolio.

• Learning Silverlight (this post)
• Learning Silverlight #1 – where to start
• Learning Silverlight #2 – Tooling Up
• Learning Silverlight #3 – Getting Started
• Learning Silverlight #4 – Sample Project

Anyway, for the first time in who knows how long I have found myself a weekend spare which I am intending to use to do a bit of a Silverlight deep-dive. For anyone reading this not familiar, I have a fairly strong background in .net and extensive experience of Flash and Flex. I’m hoping this provides me with a decent platform and offers a rapid learning curve for this exercise.

I’m mostly interested in seeing the potential for how productive Silverlight development can be. I am fairly hopeful that the tools (namely Visual Studio and Blend) will be a strong artillery for RIA development. I am also intrigued to see how much of the forming the basis of an app in Blend through drag n drop is actually useful for producing real, maintainable, efficient apps. Rather than the typical no-code solutions I’ve experienced in the past which have been more or less useless beyond simple proof of concepts. I’m sure there is a point where Blend stops and actual coding takes over, I’m just curious to find out what that point is. E.g. is it just skinning/styling or can there be some actual useful time-saving gained in the application development process through it’s state-management, data-binding and other wizardy type features.

I’m going to be blogging and tweeting the progress so feel free to follow and I’m very much open to ideas, opinions and suggestions.

So I thought rather than spend forever looking up hardware specs, recommended platforms and whatever, I’d just do the lazy thing and put it out there to the #lazyweb and see what came up.

Within moments the ever-helpful seantheflexguy responded with his spec and his endorsement of his setup:

Well, that was very useful and I thought how great it would be if we could collate more information about other RIA developers’ setups and how they rate them.

So feel free to contribute and copy the following into the comments and fill it in and you can help do my research for me share hardware spec for the benefit of the RIA community .

Computer:
Processor:
RAM:
Hard Disk Size:
Hard Disk Speed:
Primary Software Used:
Rating: / 10
Other Comments:


Here’s mine for starters:

Computer: Macbook Pro 17″
Processor: 2.4Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo
RAM: 4Gb
Hard Disk Size: 150Gb
Hard Disk Speed: 5600rpm (i think)
Primary RIA development Software Used: Flex Builder, Visual Studio 2008 (under VMWare Fusion), Sql Server 2008
Rating: 7 / 10
Other Comments: The machine has been a real workhorse for the past 2 years and has taken quite a bit of torment from me. The hardware has been fairly robust although the problems are starting to present themselves now (now i’m out of warranty!) and things are very costly to put right. Runs very hot when running FlexBuilder in OSX and VS in windows and has really started to slow down lately. Never had much of a problem with system crashes or freezing other than the occasional browser fail.

I did have debug enabled and seemingly nothing i changed would stop the error. Many of the solutions found when first searching didn’t work, what I had to do was to delete all files from the following directory:

C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\temp\Temporary ASP.NET Files

However, by default when you open a new project the project itself is the root of the solution and you can’t add another to it. Even if you create a blank solution file then ‘Add existing project’ it just automatically drills in and sets the first added project as the root and you can’t add any more.

Simple fix thought, all you need to do is:
Click Tools -> Options -> Projects and Solutions -> General -> check ‘Always Show Solution’

And you’re sorted.

Setup Visual Studio to deploy to IIS Virtual Directory
By default since VS 2005, when you run a website project it will execute in the built-in web server in visual studio. You can however set it to deploy to your windows version of IIS by doing the following:
Goto your web project’s properties (right click the project in the solution explorer and hit properties),
Select the “Web” tab,
In the Servers section select “Use IIS web server”,
Enter a name for your project and hit the “Create Virtual Directory” button.

When you run or debug your site it will now use IIS instead of the built-in web server.

Run IIS website from OSX
You’ll need to do a couple of things before you can run your IIS deployed website in OS X, firstly you need to enable remote access to the site and secondly you need to find the IP address of your parallels VM.
Go to Control Panel, Adminsitrative Tools, Internet Information Services,
Expand your Computer node and right click on the websites folder and click Properties,
In the Directory Security tab click the annonymous access Edit button,
Check the box titled “integrated windows authentication”.

Now to test your site, open a comand prompt in windows and type ipconfig to find out your windows VM address. Then in OS X open your browser and enter http://[your.ip.address]/yourVirtualDir/ and you shoudl see your asp.net website running.

Setup an alias instead of remembering the IP address
I found this out from a comment on Andy Jarrett’s blog, use the following command from terminal to use a more friendly name to access your IIS webserver (replacing ‘localhostwin’ with your chosen alias and IP address with your XP’s IP:
sudo dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Hosts/localhostwin IPAddress 10.23.0.1

Here’s the rest of the comment which has some other useful commands:

sudo dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Hosts/ridiculous.nonsense.monkeys IPAddress 192.168.0.1

Enter your password when asked, and you can now ping 192.168.0.1 with the name ridiculous.nonsense.monkeys

You can see the results of your work with:

dscl localhost -readall /Local/Default/Hosts

And to undo your handy-work:

sudo dscl localhost -delete /Local/Default/Hosts/ridiculous.nonsense.monkeys

P.S. You can see the results of your BSD flat-file method with this command:

dscl localhost -readall /BSD/local/Hosts
# Posted By j0no | 11/11/07 8:01 PM

As ususal any feedback much appreciated.

5 – The tools (cont)
Okay so downloads required were as follows:

• Silverlight Runtime
• .NET Framework 3.0
• Visual Studio Orcas
• Visual Web Developer 2008 – due to the massive download required i opted for the Express edition of visual studio for now – by all accounts the express edition doesnt allow the Silverlight extensions to be installed… back to downloading vs2008 standard again! NOTE TO MS – make this clearer please
• Visual Studio 2008 (in the time its taken me to finish this post the beta2 has been released)
• Silverlight Tools for Orcas
• Microsoft Silverlight Tools Alpha Refresh for Visual Studio (July 2007)
• Expression Blend

.NET Framework 3.0
I’ve already installed the runtime so next is .NET Framework 3.0. The .Net installer seems to have improved, although is now a whopping 30 meg which downloads and installs silently after you run the setup, it does however hog resources a little during the install but no system restart required! . A point to note is that viewing Silverlight web applications does not need the .NET 3.0 Framework to be installed, a subset of the framework is included in the Silverlight runtime. I’m installing it for the use of Expression Blend and VS Orcas.

Expression Blend
Standard install process here, there were options for “custom” or “full” install but I chose “typical” as I’m on a tight budget with regards to the spec of my laptop. I’m sure things will run painfully slow but I’ll just have to put up with it until I get a new machine. Another simple install down, so far so good.

Visual Web Developer 2008
So finally settling on giving this a go with Visual Web Developer 2008. There was a nice online install that basically setup everything for me. I like this sort of install, yeah maybe there are a million and one options i might want to set on install but in the real world if i don’t get these options I dont lose any sleep and am less frustrated with slow installs – start it going, leave it, come back and its done. – removed due to no support for the Silverlight extensions!

Visual Studio Orcas 2008 beta2
From the downloads, the first step was to run the extractor which extracts all downloads into an installation directory, this took ages just to extract it uses winRAR self-extractor which was a bit annoying in that it has a progress indicator for each file extracted but no indication of overall progress and no indication of how many files there are left. VS 2008 is going to be a bit of a resource hog.
After it had finally extracted I run vs_setup.msi… to be instantly prompted to run setup.exe (I always get that wrong). A familiar Visual Studio setup screen is presented and then a typical visual studio installation process. That was with Orcas, with VS2008 beta2 I opted to download and install the standard edition which downloaded an ISO image. Using magic ISO I extracted this and had a much quicker experience, although the install did still take a considerable amount of time.

Microsoft Silverlight Tools Alpha Refresh for Visual Studio (July 2007)
A simple to install extension to VS2008 that offers the Silverlight specific features.

And finally that is all that we apparently need.

Overall the setup experience was pretty good, alot of downloading and waiting but no painful unknown errors or crashes so i’m happy with that. A bit of confusion with the new release of vs2008 and no support for Silverlight in the Express editions. Now, finally onto some development and time for another post that might take me months to finish (hopefully not though).

Tacky Alert

Not sure why but this takes me back to 1990′s under construction pages with a bit of web 2.0 reflection… tasty!

I have been playing with the beta1 and Silverlight and am thoroughly impressed see my findings here and i’ll be finishing a follow up post very soon.