Creating a view object for every object is silly. Create them where needed. Creating them willy-nilly complicates the application needlessly. I have a 2 large applications that use 2 View objects. They both work fine. I will probably create more for some performance issues. But these are NOT DTOs. The places i use them are when i am listing complex objects such as in a search results. Where as DTOs are structures that contain the attributes of single object, View objects contain some attributes of multiple objects.

Also, use NHibernate to create the view objects. I think the documentation refers to them as type safe objects. Like – “select new SomeViewObject(Id, Name,….) from Person

I have been using NHibernate/Hibernate since the original came out. I’ve used them both in web apps and “desktop” apps.

so far, we haven’t really used it on a truly public site (as in: anyone can sign up and start using it) yet… but we are thinking of redoing our company website entirely with Silverlight. Not sure when that’s actually going to happen though.

We do use it outside of the company, over the internet, if that’s what you meant and that works great… that’s why i seriously like the reduced bandwidth overhead

as for Flash/Flex/Air… i can’t really get into their technical merits (because i have no experience with them), but the market for Flash/Flex/Air developers is _very_ small, at least here in Belgium. Which is a pretty important factor as well

I’m facing the task to convert a .Net UserControl embedded as an object in the page, used in IE, to Silverlight.

yeah the version in Brion.Library is over a year old and hasn’t been updated in a long time… none of the silverlight stuff is in there.

I’ll write a post about the asynchronous version of the request dispatcher soon
(it’ll probably be sometime next week though)

I don’t see any async test for silverlight. Can you post an example on how to load some data from the silverlight client.

Thanks for all the great posts.

However, I do see that you have a new MSI installation, so I’ll give it a go. Thanks for posting this because PRISM has been poorly launched by MS, and it also is quite large for smaller projects.

NHibernate, which sits behind our Request/Response WCF layer… none of the NHibernate entities are allowed to go outside of the service layer, so we pass simple DTO’s.

Input validation… i’d have to check to see how my coworkers do it, i honestly don’t have a clue at the moment (does it show that i hardly do any UI coding?)

And undo management… if a user presses the cancel button, we don’t send anything to the server… that’s about it

i only looked at Prism briefly, but that was only to investigate its ability to host multiple applications in some kind of a host app… i eventually just wrote that part myself because we already have our own MVP implementation, which is very similar to how we do it for ASP.NET WebForms.

So no, i’m afraid i can’t recommend one or the other… that’s not to say that i think they’re bad or anything, just that we already have most of the stuff that these frameworks offer.

browser support is pretty good… on Opera it’s still problematic but everything else seems to work very well, except browsers on Linux

as for silverlight updates… we did have a few breaking changes with silverlight upgrades. a lof of them between 1 and 2, and a few minor ones between 2 and 3. I suspect that breaking changes will be kept to an absolute minimum from now on.

We (I’m a coworker of Davy) use Davy’s Request/Response WCF service layer (he already has posted lots about that). And NO, we don’t throw any NHibernate entities over the wire. And YES, it’s a bad idea if you do so

The problem with HTML 5 is that I think it could possibly strenthen Flash/Flex by doing something they are having a hard time doing… Threading!

HTML 5 comes with background threading, and that would make Adobe a bit more competitive.

Silverlight really only has one MAJOR weakness… Runtime Ubiquity! MS has to use the time between HTML 5 arrival, and Adobe integration of threading, to get this runtime to at least the 80% range.

We’ve had to go ASPX on a Navy project because nobody wanted to fight with their IT department to allow Silverlight.

We won’t be able to live with that for long, and may have to defect to Flex if Silverlight fails to gain runtime support.

I’m pulling for Silverlight!

For us the greatest challenges hasn’t been choose between Caliburn or Prism. But implementing: datalayer, databinding (INotify..), undo, validation, working with getting data async. In short all the plumbing that CSLA and RIA Services is having.

We started with CSLA and NHibernate then we got tired of creating DTO and started sending the NH Entities to the client. Maybe this is a bad idea but it works for us.

To Davy
Can you write a post on the datalayer you are using? I guess that you are using NH and DTO’s? and maybe you can also share how you are doing input validation and undo.

I´m starting a Silverlight project from scratch next week. I´m currently looking for a simple framework to help us applying MVP/MVVM patterns.
Any suggestion? Caliburn? Prism?

Greets