As a person who gives a lot of presentations, I was looking forward to reading Confessions of a Public Speaker by Scott Berkun. I figured that I could gain some insight from another speaker and pick up a few tips. The book was far better than that! I learned a tremendous amount about how to prepare and deliver professional presentations in a very relaxed and enjoyable way. The book was very readable, funny, and quite informative. Scott shares with us his secrets and emphasis on preparation, and how being prepared can get you out of trouble if things start to go wrong in your presentation.

Scott tells a great story and gives great advice both to people new to speaking and folks like me who have been doing it a long time. Scott's style and good humor will make the book interesting for people who don't have to give presentations as well. His stories are honest as well as funny and make reading the book quite enjoyable. Lastly, I read this book in the Kindle format and was quite impressed with the layout and graphics (these days if it is not on the Kindle it doesn’t exist to me.)  I highly recommend it to everyone needing to communicate effectively.

This week we released our third “alpha” CTP build of our Telerik OpenAccess Data Services Wizard on Telerik Labs. We have received tons of feedback on the tool and look forward to more feedback. The wizard’s development team and the entire OpenAccess team have come up with a roadmap and would like some feedback from the community on it. In the spirit of a transparent design, I am going to publish the entire roadmap here for community review. Of course all of this can change blah blah blah. (The lawyers made me say that.)

Beta 1: January 2010

• Using T4 Code generation instead of text templates
• VB.NET code generation (we had a ton of requests for this one!) 
• Add WCF Data Services 1.5 full integration using the new Data Service Provider (of course we need to make changes to OpenAccess core to implement the DSP, however, the DSP is currently not fully documented by Microsoft, so we don’t know how much work this is just yet.)
• Generate only the primitive types and prevent generation of complex entities for all services. (WCF barfs on complex types and entities.)

Beta 2: February 2010

• Full support for WCF RIA Services
• Full support for Azure Services
• If you use the wizard to build a service, give you the option to automatically create a Silverlight client along with some code generation to consume the service to get you started
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data support

Release: Telerik Q1 2010 Release

• Full integration with OpenAccess’ installer. No longer making the wizard a separate install, it will just install as part of OpenAccess
• Use of OpenAccess internal APIs
• Visual Studio 2010 support
• WCF 4.0 Support. We currently require the WCF 3.5 REST Starter Kit for two of our output modes: REST Collection and AtomPub. .NET 4.0 mode will eliminate this dependency and give you the option to produce WCF 4.0 REST services, etc.

After the Q1 release the roadmap is not super clear. I will assume that core development will slow down a little and that we will then focus mostly on adding support for new service types. I am sure that by next spring, there will already be some new service types to support like the release build of WCF RIA Services, maybe a new CTP of Astoria, etc.

Drop me a line and let me know what you think! Also, the tech support team is adding a separate Data Service Wizard forum in the Telerik support forums, so even though the wizard is technically a “lab” project and not supported, drop by and ping the team with your questions there. We’ll answer all your support questions there as well.

Enjoy and thanks for any feedback you send.

Telerik released the December CTP of the Data Services Wizard earlier this week. Here is a video by .NET Ninja in training Peter Bahaa on using the wizard:

Telerik OpenAccess Data Services Wizard December CTP from Stephen Forte on Vimeo.

When: Friday, December 18, 2009, 6:30-10pm
Where: Microsoft NYC Headquarters, 1290 Avenue of the Americas, MPR room, 6th Fl
Sponsored by: Microsoft
Limited Advance Sale Tickets: $15 (per person)
http://www.ggdnyc.com/?page_id=14

*Please Note* Tickets for this event can be purchased online only. Tickets are non-refundable. If you want to bring a guest, you must purchase a ticket for them. Attendees must bring photo identification and order number to event. There will be no ticket sales at the door.

We are proud to announce our December CTP of the Telerik OpenAccess Data Services Wizard (formerly known as the WCF Services Wizard). The Data Services Wizard (DSW) allows you to easily create a CRUD data service layer for your application. The DSW does this by using a data access layer already built by OpenAccess and automatically generating the C# code for your endpoints. The types of endpoints you can create are:

• WCF Data Services (FKA Astoria and also FKA ADO. NET Data Services)
• Raw WCF endpoints
• WCF REST Collection endpoints
• WCF ATOMPub endpoints

This version of the Data Service Wizard is very robust; we have made lots of changes based on your feedback. Our #1 piece of feedback from customers has been to integrate the DSW with OpenAccess and Visual Studio. I am proud to announce that in this version the DSW is fully integrated with Visual Studio!

We have also started to integrate the DSW into the OpenAccess product itself. No longer is the DSW a standalone product; the wizard is now  located under the “Telerik” menu in Visual Studio and looks like the other OpenAccess wizards. Integration will get tighter in the near future and soon just be part of OpenAccess proper, not a separate download.

The basics of the wizard are the same. The DSW will ask you which project your OpenAccess entities are located in and then which entities you will expose in your endpoint.

After you choose the entities you want to expose and what type of service you want to build (WCF, Astoria, etc), you can preview the code that is generated.

A major improvement with the December CTP is that you can now automatically insert these service endpoint files into a project, eliminating the manual step of copying them on over. This will make building the services so much easier!

Go grab the wizard here. It is still considered a Telerik Labs project, but we will move it to a fully supported beta in January with our next build. On the dock for the next build (early January) are:

1. Using T4 Code generation instead of text templates
2. VB.NET code generation
3. Add WCF Data Services 1.5 full integration (using the new Data Service Provider)
4. Prevent the generation of complex entities for all services

Future versions of the product will be fully part of OpenAccess and will also support RIA Services, Azure Services, and Visual Studio 2010 and WCF 4.0. Download today and send us feedback!

I was talking to a fellow MVP here in Hong Kong today about the PDC. He said that since I get to go to all of these events as a speaker it must be great to watch all of the sessions and learn about all of the new technology. The problem is that when you are speaking you almost never get to attend other sessions. If you have a few sessions, you are always either getting ready, speaking, or relaxing after your talk. (Believe it or not, it is tiring to speak at these events.)

I only had one talk at the PDC and it was a BOF, so I did get to attend a few sessions. The funny thing is that I circled 10 sessions. Three where when I was speaking, two had conflicts with others, one was at 8:30am, and one conflicted with a RD meeting. So I attended 3 sessions besides the keynotes. That actually is a lot for me at one of these events.

The good news is that the PDC puts all of its sessions online for free. Why free? Read the book “Free” by Chris Anderson, it will explain how putting the sessions online for free actually increases the prestige of the conference and allows them to make more money.

You can watch all of the videos online for free at the PDC website. If you want to watch them offline you can also download all of the videos to your hard drive. The directions are on the PDC page, however, I had to use the 32 bit version of the cURL tool to get it to work on x64 Windows 7 for some reason. You may want to download the X32 version and save yourself the trouble.

Now you can download all the videos and watch them at your own pace.  I have watched about 15 sessions in the past two weeks since I have been home. Enjoy!

Yesterday I showed how to use Telerik OpenAccess, Telerik Reporting, and SQL Azure to create reports and view them in ASP.NET. Today i will show how to view that same report in Silverlight using the industry’s first native Silverlight report viewer. All of this is in the Telerik documentation, however, since we have our cool SQL Azure demo already up and running from yesterday, I figured it would be fun to show how to reuse the same report and view it in Silverlight.

Getting Started

Remember from yesterday that we have three projects in our solution:

• Telerik.Reporting.DAL-the class library project containing our OpenAccess entities (mapped back to SQL Azure tables)
• Telerik.Reporting.RptLib-the class library project containing our Telerik report using the DAL project as a data source
• Telerik.Reporting.Web-the ASP.NET application containing our Report Viewer control, allowing the users to view the report

Now we will add a Silverlight project named Telerik.Reporting.SL that will use the Telerik.Reporting.Web application as its ASP.NET host.

The Telerik Reporting WCF Service

Since all data access in Silverlight has to be an asynchronous service, we have to send our report down to our Silverlight application as a WCF service. At the end of the day a Telerik Report is just a plain old .NET class, so we can easily send it down via WCF. The good news is that a lot of the WCF plumbing has been taken care of for you by the Telerik Reporting service. Let’s get started.

First we have to set a reference in our ASP.NET host application (Telerik.Reporting.Web) to Telerik.Reporting.Service. Next add a WCF service to your project, named ReportService.svc. This will also automatically add a reference to System.ServiceModel for you.

Now delete everything in the SVC file and replace it with this:

<%@ServiceHost Service="Telerik.Reporting.Service.ReportService, Telerik.Reporting.Service, 
Version=3.2.9.1113, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=A9D7983DFCC261BE" %>

Note: you have to make sure that the version number you are using is the same as mine. You can get your version number by clicking on the Telerik.Reporting.Service reference in the solution explorer and looking at the version property.

Next you will have to add the WCF endpoint to the configuration section of the web.config of the same ASP.NET project that has the ReportService.svc WCF service. (You can copy this code to paste as is into your application from the Report Service support page.)

 <system.serviceModel>

   <serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true" />

   <services>

     <service name="Telerik.Reporting.Service.ReportService" 

        behaviorConfiguration="ReportServiceBehavior">

      <endpoint address="" binding="basicHttpBinding"

        contract="Telerik.Reporting.Service.IReportService">

         <identity>

           <dns value="localhost" />

         </identity>

       </endpoint>

       <endpoint address="resources" 

          binding="webHttpBinding"

          behaviorConfiguration="WebBehavior" 

          contract="Telerik.Reporting.Service.IResourceService"/>

       <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" 

          contract="IMetadataExchange" />

     </service>

   </services>

   <behaviors>

     <serviceBehaviors>

       <behavior name="ReportServiceBehavior">

         <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true" />

         <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="false" />

       </behavior>

     </serviceBehaviors>

     <endpointBehaviors>

       <behavior name="WebBehavior">

         <webHttp />

       </behavior>

     </endpointBehaviors>

   </behaviors>

 </system.serviceModel>

That is it for the Telerik WCF Reporting Service. Now let’s add a ReportViewer to our Silverlight application.

Using the Telerik Silverlight Report Viewer Control

The Telerik Silverlight Report Viewer offers native report viewing support for Silverlight. It uses the same rendering engine and offers the same functionalities as the other Telerik viewers, so your report will render the same in Silverlight as in Windows Forms as ASP.NET. To get started, you need to add a reference to the Telerik Silverlight controls in your Telerik.Reporting.SL project:

• Telerik.Windows.Controls.dll
• Telerik.Windows.Controls.Input.dll
• Telerik.Windows.Controls.Navigation.dll

These controls are located in the following folder:

Program Files\Telerik\RadControls for Silverlight Q3 2009\Binaries\Silverlight\

In addition, you need to add a reference to the ReportViewer:

• Telerik.ReportViewer.Silverlight.dll

This library is located in Program Files\Telerik\Reporting Q3 2009\Bin\

Lastly, add a reference to our report project: Telerik. Report.RptLib.

Now you can add the report viewer namespace and control to your XAML:

   1:  <UserControl

   2:      xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" 

   3:      xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"

   4:      xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" 

   5:      xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" 

   6:      mc:Ignorable="d" 

   7:      xmlns:Telerik_ReportViewer_Silverlight=

   8:       "clr-namespace:Telerik.ReportViewer.Silverlight;

   9:        assembly=Telerik.ReportViewer.Silverlight" 

  10:      x:Class="Telerik.Reporting.SL.MainPage"

  11:      d:DesignWidth="640" 

  12:      d:DesignHeight="480">

  13:    <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot">

  14:        <Telerik_ReportViewer_Silverlight:ReportViewer 

  15:          Margin="0,0,20,8" 

  16:          ReportServerUri="../ReportService.svc" 

  17:          Report="Telerik.Reporting.RptLib.CustomerRpt, 

  18:              Telerik.Reporting.RptLib, Version=1.0.0.0, 

  19:              Culture=neutral, 

  20:              PublicKeyToken=null"/>                                                  

  21:    </Grid>

  22:  </UserControl>

Note: The Telerik support page for the Silverlight Report Viewer is a good reference for the code needed and you can copy and paste from there instead of from here. Alternatively, you can use Expression Blend to add the report to your XAML form and you don’t have to worry about the namespaces and XAML for the ReportViewer, Blend will take care of that for you, all you have to worry about are the ReportServiceUri and Report properties. If you are not using Blend, just make sure that the properties are in the correct order in the XAML (ReportServiceUri first, Report second) or you will get some nutty bugs. (Ask me how I know this!)

You are going to have to set two properties of the ReportViewer control (either manually in XAML or in Blend):

• ReportServiceUri: or the absolute or relative path back to the WCF service in the ASP.NET solution
• Report: or the assembly qualified name of your report class

<Sidebar>

How to find the assembly qualified name of your report? I was confused at first too. There are some PowerShell tools, etc, but I am PowerShell challenged. Instead, just add a label to an ASP.NET WebForm in the Telerik.Reporting.Web project and on the page load event add this code:

   1:  Type ty = typeof(Telerik.Reporting.RptLib.CustomerRpt);

   2:  Label1.Text = ty.AssemblyQualifiedName;

Then run the page in the browser and copy and paste the fully qualified assembly name into your XAML as I did. :)

</Sidebar>

That is it. Next step is to set your Slverlight test page as startup and F5. The ReportViewer supports native printing and export capabilities to PDF, XLS, Excel, etc. Pretty cool.

Enjoy!

Telerik Reporting is a great reporting package. If you using it, you may be happy to know that you can use Telerik OpenAccess as a data source. Let’s take a look at how to use it with a SQL Azure Database as a back end.

Getting Started

First you need to map your SQL Azure tables to OpenAccess entities. I demonstrated this before on my blog, if you have not used OpenAccess and SQL Azure yet, read this post. (Don’t worry I’ll wait.) What I did for this demo is create a library project called Telerik.Reporting.DAL and mapped all of the Northwind tables in my SQL Azure database to OpenAccess entities in a class library.

Next I created another library project to contain the reports called Telerik.Reporting.RptLib. This solution will contain all of your reports. It is good to create all of the reports inside one isolated solution so you can reuse these reports in an ASP.NET solution as well as other projects like Silverlight. After we created this project, I ran the OpenAccess enable project wizard to get all of the proper references set up to use OpenAccess. In addition, I set a reference to our Telerik.Reporting.DAL project so we can see the entities we just mapped.

Creating a Report

Now it is time to create a report. Just right click on the project and select Add| New Item and choose the Telerik Report Q3 2009 template from the Reporting category.

The Telerik Reporting Wizard will come up. Select the option to build a new report and a new data source. For a data source type, select Business Object from the options available.

Next drill down into the Telerik.Reporting.DAL namespace and then select the Customer entity.

The next few pages of the wizard ask you how to lay out your report and what data fields to choose from. The wizard is self explanatory, so I will not go into detail here, but just choose any style that you like and show some customer fields on the report. I choose to show Customer ID and Company Name in standard report. My report looks pretty basic in design view:

Wiring up the data

We are almost there. Next step is to write a little LINQ code behind your report to wire up the OpenAcces data source with your report. Right click on the design canvas of the report and select “View Code.” That will take you to the code behind. Create a function like the one below that uses the OpenAccess LINQ implementation and return all of the customers (We could more complex LINQ queries here if we wanted to. )

   1:  public static List<Customer> GetCustomers()

   2:  {

   3:      //LINQ Query to fetch all of the Customers via OpenAccess            

   4:      //data context (IObjectScope)

   5:      IObjectScope dat = ObjectScopeProvider1.GetNewObjectScope();

   6:      //Get a ILIst of Customers

   7:      List<Customer> result = (from c in dat.Extent<Customer>() select c).ToList();

   8:      return result;

   9:  }

The function above returns a List of Customers. The IObjectScope in line 5 is the data context and the LINQ statement is in line 7.

But we have one problem. While we set all of the proper references, we are missing a bunch of using statements. You can manually add them here:

   1:  using System.Collections.Generic;

   2:  using System.Data;

   3:  using System.Linq;

   4:  using Telerik.OpenAccess;

   5:  using Telerik.Reporting.DAL;

Or you can use the new Telerik JustCode tool to organize and fix your using statements:

You need to add one more line of code to your report. Add the following to the report’s construtctor, it will wire up your function as the data source of the report:

   1:  DataSource = GetCustomers();

The ReportViewer Control

Now it is time to view the report. To do that create a new ASP.NET application called Telerik.Reporting.Web. Set a reference to the Telerik.Reporting.RptLib project where the report you just created is located. After that drag a Telerik ReportViewer control from your palate to the ASP.NET web form.

All you need to do now is add one line of code to the page load event (or a button click event, etc) to load the CustomerRpt we just built into the ReportViewer.

   1:  if (!IsPostBack) { ReportViewer1.Report = new CustomerRpt(); }

Next step is to run it and see your report in action!

Enjoy!