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This week we examine the announcements at the Mobile World Congress; Silverlight, jQuery, and YUI get updates; the Model View ViewModel application pattern is analyzed, and we look at tips for JavaFX mobile development. All this and more on the Weekly RIA RoundUp from InsideRIA.

FEATURED: Big Announcements at Mobile World Congress

As we mentioned in last week's podcast, the mobile and RIA worlds are certainly coming together. This week was the annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. While some announcements came early, like the JavaFX mobile application platform, we knew we would also be hearing from Microsoft and Adobe.

Microsoft

Microsoft's big announcements at MWC centered around the upcoming Windows Mobile 6.5 which includes a new application store. This new version of Windows Mobile also includes a web application that allows the user to integrate with certain aspects of their phone through the browser.

Microsoft Press Release: Microsoft Reveals New Windows Phones With Marketplace and My Phone Services

Adobe

Adobe had several big announcements at MWC. These include:

• Flash Player 10 on SmartPhones - Adobe will be releasing Flash Player 10 on several smartphones over the next year. This includes Windows Mobile, Palm (Pre), Nokia/Symbian S60, and Android devices.
• Flash Mobile 3.1 Packager - Adobe released a beta of Flash Mobile 3.1 and the Mobile Packager which allows developers to build installable packages for Windows Mobile and Symbian. These applications can download Flash Mobile 3.1 over the air.
• Flash Lite Developer Challenge - Adobe also announced the Flash Lite Developer Challenge with over $100,000 in prize money (across multiple categories).
• Open Screen Project Fund - There is now a $10 million market development fund to assist developers in creating applications across mobile, consumer devices, and the desktop.

InsideRIA: What the recent Adobe mobile announcements mean for RIA

Distributable Flash Lite at Adobe Labs

Flash Lite Developer Challenge

Open Screen Project Fund

Silverlight Gets an Update

This week Silverlight 2 GDR1 was released. This release mainly addresses bug fixes. Tim Heuer provides instruction on how to force users to upgrade when viewing your Silverlight application.

Tim Sneath (Microsoft): Silverlight 2 GDR1 Now Available

Tim Heuer (Microsoft): Silverlight 2 gets minor update

jQuery 1.3.1 Released

jQuery pushed out its first maintenance release since the big 1.3 release. This release fixes over 20 issues from the last release.

jQuery Blog: jQuery 1.3.1 Released

Tips for JavaFX Mobile Development

Michael Heinrichs of Sun published an article this week that outlines some best practices for mobile JavaFX development. This article is an essential read for anyone wanting to take advantage of the mobile JavaFX platform included in the JavaFX 1.1 SDK.

Michael Heinrichs (Sun): Best Practices for JavaFX Mobile Applications

ExtJS Team Releases AIR Pixel Bender Explorer

The ExtJS team introduced a new AIR application that demonstrates the power of Pixel Bender filter support in Adobe AIR 1.5. The application, built with ExtJS and AIR, lets the user try different filters on an application to see the effect.

ExtJS Blog: Pixel Bender Explorer: Bending Ext AIR Apps

Introduction to Spring / BlazeDS Integration

Christophe Coenraets, evangelist at Adobe, recorded an episode on Adobe TV that covers the basics of the BlazeDS / Spring integration. This episode is roughly 8 minutes long and helps developers familiar with Spring and BlazeDS to take advantage of the new integration.

Christophe Coenraets (Adobe): Spring / BlazeDS Integration on Adobe TV

YUI 2.7.0 Released

In honor of YUI's third anniversary, the YUI team released version 2.7.0. The biggest addition in this release is the new StyleSheet utility. The page states,

developed by YUI engineer Luke Smith, provides a means to optimize the application of a style or changes to existing styles across multiple elements without incurring the cost of a page reflow for each element. Using the benefits of dynamic CSS, the StyleSheet Utility allows the creation of new stylesheets and changes to existing stylesheets that can be applied to multiple elements without the need to loop through the elements in the DOM, thus maintaining an optimal experience for the end user of the page.

This release also includes over 180 bug fixes.

YUI Blog: YUI 2.7.0 Released

Ajaxian: YUI Turns 3 and We Get a New Release as a Gift!

Prism 2 released for Silverlight / WPF

Prism 2 (also known as Composite Application Guidance) was released this week. Tim Heuer states that "Prism guidance is a set of tools, samples, references and written guidance to help you more easily build modular applications". This version of Prism expands the focus of Prism v1 from just WPF applications to include Silverlight applications.

Tim Heuer (Microsoft): Prism v2 - Guidance and Patterns for WPF and Silverlight

MVVM Architecture in Silverlight Applications

Shawn Wildermuth gives on overview of the Model-View-ViewModel architectural pattern for Silverlight 2 applications in the latest MSDN magazine. He walks through common application structure problems and how the MVVC pattern can help to eliminate them.

Shawn Wildermuth: Model-View-ViewModel In Silverlight 2 Apps

Read more from David Tucker.