>>>>Today I am Pluralsighting my brains out on Breeze.js which is quite cool. I think I'm finally starting to understand this stuff. Having done quite a bit of developer training I really am in awe of the quality of what is out there on Pluralsight. This Brian Noyes presentation of Breeze is really first rate as is the
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>>>>John Papa has a course coming very soon on doing a SPA with Angular, Breeze and WebAPI, which is pretty much the stack I think I'm setting on for now.
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>>>> Also kind of geeking out on Typescript as it answers a lot of the stuff that makes me go AAARGH about javascript.
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>>>Stupid question: what is Breeze? And what do you do with the combination of Angular, Breeze, and WebAPI? Web sites?
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>>Here, let me google that for you...
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>>The idea is that business applications today should be accessible through what we used to call "web apps" I personally scoffed at because I felt I needed a rich client. But now it is not only possible but a pretty good idea to write rich client apps that run in a browser and are smart enough to know how to scale for a phone, tablet etc. Exposing data is done through web services. Breeze is a javascript library that helps tie the client side to the server side, handling stuff like transactions, identity keys and foreign keys when adding a parent and children in the same session, validation on the client side etc. Persists metadata from the data model to the client side which is very cool and allows for Linq queries of backend data outside what the web service would normally provide.
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>>Angular is a framework in javascript that takes care of a lot of plumbing, include 2 way data binding in the UI.
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>>Typescript is a design time tool to impose some strong typing, class structure etc on loosy goosy javascript making it more like C# and less like Foxpro. <g>
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>>Oh, and Breeze comes from Ward Bell and the folks at Ideablade which I always thought were going to be the people who made Entity Framework really work. All the stuff that was in Devforce is pretty much there for free now in Breeze.
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>>The whole stack is really exciting and I think is catching on big-time. Angular is funded by Google, Typescript by microsoft and they all love Breeze. There is also Bootstrap, another javascript library which handles a whole lot of stuff including being smart about delivering UI depending on the screen etc.
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>>Lots of fun. I thought you had a Pluralsight subscription?
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>Thanks for the info, Charles. Point taken about doing my own googling. I was just hoping for something from the perspective of someone who has used it, as opposed to vendor spin or god knows what else is going to turn up in a search. And yes, I do have PluralSight. I just like to have some idea of what it is before jumping in and going through a course. At the moment I am focusing on jQuery (including PluralSight material) and have some familiarity with Typescript from magazine articles. Will have a look at Breeze and Angular after that on your recommendation. Thanks again.

I was just kidding about the Google - hence the serious reply.

I really am pretty stoked about Breeze. I have been studying entity framework but there still seemed to be some plumbing missing for a lazy guy like me to use it through a webservice. This is really the missing piece.

The extremely cool part is the ability to construct queries in ways that are syntactically more pleasing to me than standard linq to entities (though very similar) on the client side and then have Breeze use those, with its knowledge of the EF metadata, to query the database and return only those entities in the query - even to the server side cache. Devforce was showing stuff like this a year or so ago and I was blown away. I think they cut a deal with Microsoft or somebody to develop this as breeze.js (it is the same people) as there is probably a lot more steady money in that than in selling and supporting developer frameworks ala Devforce (a deal like that for F1 with microsoft was thought about but timing was bad as VFP was on the way out and there was no real interest there in making it a true SQL server middle tier.)

Anyway, the more I see of Breeze the more impressed I am. The UI benefits of HTML5, jQueryUI etc sold me long ago and the data binding of either knockout or angular seals the deal. Worth looking in to and the resources are there on Pluralsight to really get up to speed on it. Never had these kinds of tools or training 5 or 10 years ago.