Opera Unite - Reinventing Web?

Opera Unite : “A new technology that shakes up the old client-server computing model of the Web”.

Opera unite provides the following services:

Here is good post on installing and configuring these services. The only service that I felt interesting was the ‘Web Server’. So I tried it and the first cut really went well. Below is the link of a file hosted on my laptop by unite:
http://home.jomitvaghela.operaunite.com/webserver/content/

My first impression:
While the services being offered are not at all new, the crux here is the ease of sharing this from your own device using a simple browser.

Try it out yourself and share your thoughts. . . . .

Rebuilding Microsoft.com/SharePoint

Since last couple of months I, along with my wonderful team including Todd, Vivek, Meeta and Ritu had been working with Tony on rebuilding the Microsoft's SharePoint web site.

The web site went live last month : http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint . . . .

and now, there is also a 'How we did it' article on MSDN describing goals and technicals details of how we developed all the pieces and fitted it together.

Loading .xap files OnDemand using Composite Client Application Guidance (PRISM)

One of the challenges of porting large business applications on silverlight is the size of .xap file. A typical business app would have multiple screens, rich data visualization and lots of user interaction which would in turn increase the overall size of the xap file. Also it would have users with multiple roles and each role would have specific permissions to specific screens. 
So wouldn’t it be nice to divide the entire app into multiple silverlight modules and than load them only when required  ? This is where PRISM can help us . . .

Composite Client Application Guidance (PRISM) provides us a rich framework to divide a silverlight application into various Modules and also load them ‘on demand’. A module can be a separate silverlight app. You can watch Erick’s video for creating the basic structure of a PRISM Project.

The solution structure for our scenario would be a bit different with multiple Silverlight Applications linked to a Single Web App as below :

Now what we need is a Default View which would be loaded first and than some triggers/events which would load the other on-demand views. 
In our case “DefaultView” is in “MyPortal” app and the “VoterModule” inside MyVoterModule Application would be loaded on-demand when a button is clicked from “DefaultView”.

Next, we need to add our Modules into the ModulesCatalog :

ModulesCatalog.xaml

 

The important thing to note here is that we can create groups of modules and than can specify when do we want to initialize the modules being loaded in that particular group. We can also add modules via code instead of loading it from a xaml file.

Than we need to create some event on the DefaultView which would load the VoterModule. I have created a simple button as under, but we can also add more complex business logic to drive the loading of modules :

That’s all we need. The VoterModule would add the appropriate view onto the region and since we have specified to load this “OnDemand” the entire .xap for that application would be loaded when we click on the button.

We can also verify this using Fiddler . . .