DevForce in the Cloud: Prism Explorer

On our second flight to Azure, we deployed our “Prism Explorer” sample application. The address is the same as before: http://dftest003.cloudapp.net/

The UI dates from Silverlight 2 (our first Silverlight release). We’ve ported it forward to DevForce 2010 and Silverlight 4 but haven’t touched the XAML. Pretty ugly but it gets the point across. Some day, some day …

Prism Explorer, aside from showing that DevForce and Prism play nice, demonstrates a variety of DevForce features such as:

• Arbitrarily complex queries, including anonymous projections
• Add, delete (enabled for Customer only in this case), and save
• Integrated validation (e.g., Customer requires a city)
• Lazy and eager load of related entities
• Online and offline (toggle “Connect” button)
• Save and restore entities to isolated storage file
• Out of browser

Here it is, running Out-of-Browser, after querying for “Customers (and their orders) starting with C”

Here’s another moment in the life of the UI – queried for all Employees and clicked Edit button on good ole Nancy Davolio:

I shot video of Kim and me deploying it. Raw footage is 40 minutes, much of that watching it build on my stressed-out notebook (Camtasia and VS competing for cycles). Hope to get it to 20 minutes after cutting out the dross.

Still, I was amazed to get this done in 50 minutes of clock time (paused video 10 minutes while publishing to Azure staging ). That includes commentary, fumbling, and miscues.

More on all of that in my next post.