Brad Abrams gives a brief overview of what Microsoft .NET RIA Services is and how it's going to make your life simpler. Read more

Jeff Prosise writes in the March 2009 issue of MSDN Magazine about three important things to remember for Silverlight development. First, you need to be aware that many calls to XamlReader.Load that test fine on PCs in the United States will fail on PCs in other countries. Next, that Silverlight's rendering engine is intimately tied to the UI thread and that this fact can profoundly impact your code structure. And that finally, you can reduce the size of your XAP files by dynamically loading assemblies. Read more

Rob Cherney writes about the IE8 Meta Tag to insure your web pages are compatible with the new browser: "...the IE 8 meta tag needs to be placed above any linked files. Enjoy the chance to not fix your site for now, that doesn't happen very often." Read more

While Silverlight 2 was designed to be fully backwards-compatible with Silverlight 1.0, there is a chance that you may have some JavaScript code that behaves differently than expected when your application is accessed by somebody with the Silverlight 2 runtime. In this blog entry, Microsoft's Laurence Moroney discusses what you need to do to be sure your JavaScript applications have no problems. Read more

As Silverlight 2 gets close to RTW, Expression Blend is receiving an update as well. If you have Expression Blend 2 and haven't updated to 2.5, follow the link to patch your version to this SP1 preview. Those using Blend 2.5 should uninstall and patch their copies of Blend 2 with Blend 2 SP1. If you haven’t yet purchased Blend 2 you can download a trial which you can then patch while you try the product. Be aware, Blend 2.5 will expire, probably not tool long after the RTW of Silverlight.
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In this tutorial, Brad Abrams walks you through how to access the WCF application services from a directly from the Silverlight client. This works super well if you have a site that is already using the ASP.NET application services and you just need to access them from a Silverlight client.
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In this post we will look at one of the architectural aspects of the enterprise class applications—application partitioning. Application partitioning is done for a variety of reasons including the following:

To optimize download times

To chunk the application down to a set of manageable deployment units

To isolate sensitive parts of the application from the anonymous parts

To get loosely coupled integration with external applications

To bridge the differences between the development model and the deployment model
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Delivering business processing logic through RIA (Rich Internet Application) format is very attractive to architects, developers and operators of IT shops. RIA combines the richness of the desktop application with the ease of deployment, ubiquity and platform independence of the web application. RIAs in the form of mashups, are very popular in the consumer space but have yet to see similar success in the enterprise space. Enterprise applications are stateful and process-centric in nature.
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Jon Galloway discusses the challenges and solutions to handling keyboard input in Silverlight including:

Silverlight not firing the KeyDown event for cursor (arrow) keys

The difference between Key and PlatformKey

The missing Key Enumeration

How to create a keyboard handler event
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In Adam Flater's Flex blog, he suggests for teams getting started with RIAs that they:

Use Source Control

Create an easy designer/developer workflow

Select a micro-architecture, patterns and frameworks that work for your group
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Liquidboy writes in his blog: "Using a ScaleTransform on the canvas will scale all of it's children by the same proportion!"
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Justin Whitney writes "hold down the Shift key while you drag the corner points of an asset in Expression Blend for proportional resizing."
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Flexexamples.com has an example to show you how to "embed a font from a Flash SWF into a Flex application using either @font-face in a <mx:Style /> block, or using the [Embed] metadata."
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Franto writes in his FlexTips blog "when you have content which is masked and you allow scale for your application, the mask will not scale if it is not added to the display list. If you have this problem, add you mask to your display list (addChild)."
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