Sunday, July 10, 2011

July Silverlight Giveaway by Mindscape, First Floor Software and more!

by mbcrump via Michael Crump on 7/10/2011 6:08:19 PM

We are celebrating our 10th Silverlight Giveaway this month! Anyways, we will give away several great Silverlight products and have multiple winners. This way the Silverlight community can grow with more than just one person winning all the prizes. This month we will be giving away:

1. Mindscape LightSpeed 4– Blazingly fast .NET domain modeling & persistence
2. Mindscape Silverlight Elements - Create stunning Silverlight solutions faster than ever before!
3. Silverlight Spy – provides a license EVERY month for this giveaway.

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Win a FREE developer’s license of one of the products listed above!

Multiple winners will be announced on August 1st, 2011!

To be entered into the contest do the following things:

1. Follow me on twitter. 
2. Leave a comment below with a valid email account and leave your twitter username as well. (I WILL NOT share this info with anyone.)
3. Retweet the following : I just entered to win free #Silverlight controls from @mbcrump . Register here: http://mcrump.me/fTSmB8 !
   Don’t change the URL because this will allow me to track the users that Tweet this page.

Don’t forget to visit each of the vendors sites because they made this possible.

MichaelCrump.Net provides Silverlight Giveaways every month. You can also see the latest giveaway by bookmarking http://giveaways.michaelcrump.net .

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Mindscape Lightspeed 4

Key Features

• Powerful Visual Designer
  Save time - from no code to a working domain model in 10 minutes with the rich Visual Studio 2008 & 2010 integrated LightSpeed Designer. Create entities, drag and drop tables from your database, add rich validation and round-trip updates to and from your database. Try it to experience the difference! Watch the getting started screencast or read more about the designer features.
• LINQ Support
  LightSpeed includes LINQ support when targeting .NET 3.5 or above meaning you can leverage either the built in LINQ-to-LightSpeed querying model or the traditional LightSpeed querying model. This feature effectively enables LINQ to MySQL, LINQ to PostgreSQL, LINQ to SQLite, LINQ to Sql Server and LINQ to Oracle.
• Migrations built in
  Save yourself the pain of writing sql migrations - LightSpeed can manage schema migrations for you! Save hours of with this one feature alone!
• Convention Over Configuration
  LightSpeed does away with verbose XML configuration and mapping files in favor of a simple, consistent set of conventions for how domain objects should be built. This approach increases agility by both minimizing unnecessary duplication, and, by providing a consistent set of patterns for how the domain model is represented.
• Small & Lightning Fast
  LightSpeed is designed to be fast. It employs several advanced performance enhancing techniques such as dynamic methods (LCG) instead of reflection, multi-reader eager loading, lazy loading and optimized query batching. Our internal benchmarks show LightSpeed to be faster than NHibernate.
• Employs Best Practice Patterns
  LightSpeed uses patterns from domain-driven design including Repository, Unit of Work, Entity, Value Object andSpecification.
• Designed for Testability
  LightSpeed is designed with testability in mind. It allows for mocking of key interfaces along with built-in support for transactional testing. Additionally, due to LightSpeed's transparent support for multiple databases, unit testing can be performed against a small local database such as SQLite.
• Legendary support
  We answer most help requests in under 24 hours and add new features and enhancements to our nightly builds based on feedback so all users can enjoy them!

Mindscape Silverlight Elements – (Originally gave away in November 2010 and giving them away again with Lightspeed.

Before we get started with the Silverlight Controls, here is three links to bookmark:

• The online/offline documentation is located here.
• If you are like me and want local (offline documentation) then click here. 
• The live demo page is located here.

I am going to walk you through the Silverlight Controls recently released by Mindscape.

Begin by downloading the trial version and double click on the setup file.

After it is installed, you may want to take a look at your Toolbox in Visual Studio 2010. Look for Mindscape and you will see that you now have access to all of these controls.

After you get finished looking at your new toolbox, its time to play with them. I wanted to highlight a few of the controls that I liked the most:

Coverflow – is typically used to present a gallery of images such as book covers or video previews. Below is a screenshot of it in action. This would be great to include with a MediaElement that Silverlight natively supports.

SplitButton - displays a button which the user can click normally, but with an arrow that the user can select to drop down a selection of alternative commands. Think of this as a cross between a Button and a ComboBox. This may be easier to show in a picture:

Screen real-estate is expensive, and this control provides the best of both worlds. It also will allow you to add an image to give it that RIA look that we are used too.

Dual-progress bar – acts similarly to a normal progress bar, but allows the progress of individual sub-operations to be shown. Imagine you need two progress bars 1) Overall File Progress and 2) Progress of individual file. This controls will allow you to do that and take up a small amount of screen real estate.

Custom Cell Templates – Think of this as a cross between a ListView and a TreeView. You can easily add items and display information horizontally as shown below.

Charting – One of the best features of the new Mindscape controls is the charting. Before I show you some of the Charts, its important to note the “Code” button at the bottom of the demo page. This is included with every Chart, so you should be able to find the chart you like and grab the XAML for it.

I work with data at my company and the charts that Mindscape produces is simply amazing. I wanted to show you some of the charts so that you could get a sample of what they offer:

Silverlight Spy

Silverlight Spy is a runtime inspector tool that will tell you pretty much everything that is going on with the application. Basically, you give it a URL that contains a Silverlight application and you can explore the element tree, events, xaml and so much more.

This has already been reviewed on MichaelCrump.net.

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Thanks for reading and don’t forget to leave a comment below in order to win one of the prizes available!

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