Hey everyone,

I’ve just had a very interesting seminar about Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Silverlight by the fine people over at QFrame.

Speakers were Jan Rauter, Frederik Delbroek and Stefan Van de Poel.

Jan Rauter gave us an insight about what kind of company QFrame is, what they do and what their vision is.
After that, Frederik Delbroek took over and explained what WCF is, why it’s used and ofcourse, a few demos.
Then we had a 20 minute break and after the break, Stefan Van de Poel explained Silverlight and the new features from Silverlight 4.

WCF

I’ll be honest, this is the first time I’ve ever heard someone talk about WCF. I mean, I have heard the term WCF before but I had very little knowledge about what it actually was.
Frederik did a nice job at explaining what WCF was all about.

He explained why people use WCF and explained how it worked.
By means of simple demos, he took us over the steps involved in creating a WCF service (A simple SMS program, where a client would send a message to the service)

He explained what a service contract was, how we have to expose the service and deploy it and in the end consume the service by the means of a client program.
Frederik showed how easy it was to modify the entire process, how to add / remove endpoints and different types of security.
After all, we don’t want our precious data to be sent over the net unencrypted!

When Frederik was done with the basics, he showed us a more advanced example where he utilized the built-in security in WCF, such as message security and what the difference was between unencrypted and encrypted data sent by the application.

In the end, I was very impressed of what WCF does and can do and it surely increased my curiosity regarding WCF. I’ll surely start looking into this when I have some spare time!

Silverlight

The silverlight part was incredible aswell. I still remember the presentation given by (my now fellow MSP) Wouter Devinck at the Students 2 Business day 2010 in Antwerp but Stefan showed us some incredible stuff aswell. (He did have a larger timeframe then Wouter to do his presentation :P)

Stefan went over the basics of Silverlight, explaining what XAML was, how templates & skinning work and how it all comes together.
He did have alot more demos then Frederik to show the capabilities of Silverlight but that didn’t bother me at all. I simply love demos 😀

Stefan also showed Microsoft Expression Studio 4 (aka Blend) and how it can work together with Visual Studio.
Apperantly it’s a common thing that you can do your designing for your Silverlight application (which is ALOT easier in Expression Studio then it is in Visual Studio) and at the same time do all your coding in Visual Studio while using the SAME project.
Haven’t you noticed that when you change a file in your Visual Studio solution OUTSIDE of Visual Studio and you focus back to Visual Studio you get this popup saying something along the lines of “This file has been changed outside Visual Studio, would you like to reload the file?”
That’s exactly what makes it so easy to use Microsoft Expression Studio and Visual Studio together.
If you want, and you’re a student, you can get Microsoft Expression Studio 4 Ultimate for FREE over at dreamspark!

After the basics, Stefan explained some more advanced features of Silverlight 4, how the Client File Storage works, the Out-of-browser option etcera.

In the end he also compared ASP.NET + AJAX with Silverlight and pointed out why Silverlight was such an improvement over the other.

As I stated in one my previous posts, I’m eager to start looking into Silverlight but I’m already busy as it is 🙁

In the end, I’m glad to say this was a very, very interesting seminar and I’d love to see more of these!
I might apply do to my internship over at QFrame but at the moment it’s still in the dark (Takes me about 4 hrs / day to travel back & forth)