I was having other VS issues.

I reinstalled DevForce and the links are now correct. It must have been an upgrade anomoly.

 

Ben

I thought the learning units were not included in the last realse. When I tried to access the Learning units from the start menu, it came back as a missing shortcut.

It is pointing at ""C:\MyTutorials\Learning Resources\LearningResources.htm"" instead of "C:\Users\Public\Documents\DevForce\Learning Resources\", just  heads up.

I'm digging into the samples now.

Do you have an example or documentation using the PagedCollectionView with Devforce for Silverlight?

 

Ben

The learning units are usually intended to highlight a specific feature or solution to a problem, and are intentionally kept as simple as possible.  As our product matures we'll provide more full-featured samples and tutorials (as we do in our other products today), but right now we don't want to make it a prerequisite that a developer understand a dozen different things before they can understand and use the learning unit, especially since Silverlight itself has a steep enough learning curve.

 

We are not actually supplying a DataPager control, since the one in SL3 is sufficient.  What we will be providing is an implementation of IPagedCollectionView, which will allow you to use a DataPager and DataGrid with a DevForce EntityQuery and hide the mechanics of the underlying async queries.

 

We generally recommend using a Persistence layer in any non-trivial application.  In most if not all of our learning units you'll see an EntityManager instantiated within a page, but that's really a "demo-ware" type of approach and not recommended in a real application.   The Model Explorer and Prism Explorer samples both show a more robust application architecture and highlight techniques we recommend.

 

That said, you can certainly create an EntityManager for (and within) each page if that's what you want to do.  Using a "sandbox" approach like this is often useful for undo scenarios, where you want the ability to work in a separate area and commit or rollback as needed.  The checkpointing feature within the EntityManager can be useful in these cases too, but the separate EM approach can be more robust and performant. 

 

If you've found any patterns to be particularly effective with Silverlight applications (or Silverlight and DevForce), why not post them here to share with the community.