Top 7 #Dotnet Posts Of 2010

We are in the eve of 2010, and I’ld like to provide a round up post on the most popular links of this blog, in 2010. Yep, 7 is a number I love :). 2010 was a special year for me, personally and professionally.

Top 7 Posts Of 2010

During 2010, this blog has got a lot of visibility. I’ve shown some consistency in blogging, and the subscriber base grew significantly (Thanks to my readers). Some of the posts got featured in MSDN Flash, and Scott Hanselman featured some of my apps (the oData Silverlight Nerd Dinner Client) in one of his presentations on oData. My yet another post on Top 7 Ebooks also got mentioned in a Channel 9 video.

So, Here is the list of top 7 posts of 2010 in this blog, based on popularity.

• 7 Freely available E-Books/Guides I found essential for .NET Programmers and Architects  - A lot of people ask me for good book recommendations on .NET and Architecture. Hence, I compiled this list of free ebooks available for .NET programmers and budding architects.
• Top 7 Coding Standards & Guideline Documents For C#/.NET Developers – A list of best coding standards and guideline documents for C# and .NET developers.
• 4 .NET 4.0 Libraries You *Should* Know Better – MEF, Reactive, Tasks and Dynamic - In this post, I’ve consolidated few posts on four .NET libraries/frameworks, that’ll help you write better apps.
• Top 5 Common programming mistakes .NET developers must avoid !! – A list of programming mistakes that .NET developers should avoid.
• 6 Cool #VS2010 Quick Tips you should know when working with Visual Studio 2010 - Visual Studio 2010 is super cool. Here are few features I love most in VS 2010.
• An RSS Reader For All Screens - Sharing your View Model and Code between Windows Phone 7, Silverlight, WPF, Surface - Microsoft’s unified client application development stack is so awesome. Here is an example of sharing code across multiple platforms and devices.
• 5 Interesting C# Articles – Fluent Interfaces, Anon Types, ‘dynamic’ keyword, Lambda Expressions, Type Inference etc - In this round up post, I’ve listed down some of my “Back To Basics” C# Articles.

On A Personal & Professional Note

As I mentioned, personally, 2010 brought us a lot of joy. On February 14, 2010, myself and Radhika got blessed with Kuttimalu. Now she is 8 months old, and the joy of being a responsible father and a loving husband is really amazing. Here is my daughter :).

 

Also, 2010 was the year I started committing quality time for blogging and community involvement. I’ve received Microsoft MVP award for Client Application development this April. I’ve also presented in a couple of conferences and developer meets, including Great Indian Developer Summit, Microsoft CTD, VTD etc. I also changed my job in 2010. I’ve shifted to Marlabs as a Solution Architect for their Microsoft Centre Of Excellence (MS-COE), and started working with some great people, with a set of exciting challenges and goals that’s really aligned with my interests and passion in technology.

I’ld like to thank all of you, each of you, for the learning and inspiration I had so far from the community. I’m looking forward for 2011 with great excitement, I’ve few things really interesting in front of me. The .NET community is very vibrant, and I wish  each of you a very adventurous, exciting and happy 2011, filled with a lot of happiness, radiance and self-containment. Let us share our knowledge, let us learn from each other, let us enable ourselves and others – for I believe that the true objective of technology is to uplift the society, the people around us.

In ancient India, all the students used to recite this sloka together

"Om Sahanaa Vavatu Sahanau Bhunaktu
Saha Veeryam Karavaavahai
Tejasvi Naavadheetamastu Maa Vidvishaavahai
Om Shantih Shantih Shantih"

Meaning - Let all of us protect each other together, may all of us enjoy together, may all of us work together and let our qualities become radiant. Let there be no hatred between us - Peace, Peace, Peace.

Bye & Thank You 2010. Let us Welcome 2011.

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An RSS Reader For All Screens - Sharing your View Model and Code between Windows Phone 7, Silverlight, WPF, Surface

Microsoft’s unified client application development stack is so awesome. If you are equipped with the knowledge of developing Client applications leveraging XAML and MVVM, you should be able to build applications for multiple devices, including Windows Phone 7, Silverlight, WPF and Microsoft Surface. And to a great extent, you can re-use code across these, if you wish to.

A Quick Introduction

In short, we will see how we are re-using most portions of the source code (including the View Model) across WP7, Silverlight, WPF and Surface, to build a simple RSS Reader. During my Virtual tech days demo, I gave a session on building an Rss reader by sharing the code across WP7, Silverlight, WPF and Surface. The screen cast is now available for download, and you may watch it here. The video also explains the basics of XAML, MVVM etc.

 

What we are building?

To begin with, I’m using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, with Silverlight developer tools, Windows Phone 7 tools and Microsoft Surface SDK for touch devices installed. We’ll be building an RSS reader, for all the above devices, and these are the screen shots of the final applications.

In Surface Simulator:

In Browser (Silverlight):

In Desktop (WPF):

In Windows Phone 7:

 

As you may see in the above demo, almost 80% of the code is shared via multi targeting. The classes we share include

• RssReaderViewModel – Which is our actual view model.
• RssEntry – The model element that actually holds a element.
• RssReader – Contains methods for fetching the RSS feed from a remote server.
• AsyncDelegateCommand – My own asynchronous version of delegate command.

In all the projects, you may see a ‘Shared’ folder, that has the links to the shared files in the RssReader.Common project.  The views are different per device, but the view model, the feed fetching logic etc remain the same. See the Solution Explorer.

The Source Code

Explore the source code here in Codeplex. It is a quick demo I’ve put together, so you should add stuff like proxy support for the web client if you are going to test this behind a proxy.

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