Product Description

Over 115 practical recipes for creating rich, data-driven, business applications in Silverlight 5 using this book and eBook

• Design and develop rich data-driven business applications in Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 following best practices using this book and eBook
• Rapidly interact with services and handle multiple sources of data within Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 business applications
• Understand sophisticated data access techniques in your Silverlight business applications by binding data to Silverlight controls, validating data in Silverlight, getting data from services into Silverlight applications, using data and services using MVVM techniques and much more!.
• Packed with practical, hands-on cookbook recipes, illustrating the techniques to solve particular data problems effectively within your Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 business applications

In Detail

Microsoft Silverlight is a programmable web browser plugin that enables features including animation, vector graphics, and audio-video playback - features that characterize Rich Internet Applications. However, Silverlight is a great (and growing) Line-Of-Business platform and is increasingly being used to build data-driven business applications, both in an out of the browser. It is also the heart of Windows Phone 7 development so developers can leverage their knowledge on Microsoft's new mobile platform as well. Services enable efficient access to your data, allowing you to draw on multiple sources of data and solve particular data problems. There is very little existing material that demonstrates how to build data-driven, enterprise-ready solutions with the platform. Silverlight 3 and 4 made a big step into Line-Of-Business data services and Silverlight 5 builds further upon this.

In this book, Gill Cleeren, Microsoft Regional Director, Silverlight MVP (former ASP.NET MVP), Telerik MVP at Ordina Belgium and Kevin Dockx, a technical specialist/project leader on .NET web applications and a solution manager for Rich Applications at RealDolmen, focus on showing .NET developers how to get their finger on the pulse of data-driven business applications in Silverlight and Windows Phone 7. What's more, the upcoming Windows 8 will allow developers to build native, immersive Metro-style applications using XAML & C# - exactly what this book is based upon. In other words, the techniques described in this book also apply to Windows 8.

This book is not a general Silverlight 4/5 overview book; it is uniquely aimed at developers who want to build data-driven applications, based on best practices. It focuses on showing .NET developers how to interact with, and handle multiple sources of data in Silverlight business applications, and how to solve particular data problems following a practical hands-on approach, using real-world recipes. It is a practical cookbook that teaches you how to build data-rich business applications with Silverlight that draw on multiple sources of data. Most of the features covered work both in Silverlight 4 and 5. However, we cover some that are specific to Silverlight 5, which will therefore not work with Silverlight 4. Where this is the case, it is clearly indicated.

Packed with reusable, real-world recipes, the book begins by introducing you to general principles when programming Silverlight. It then dives deep into the world of data and services, covering all the options available to access data and communicate with services to get the most out of data in your Silverlight business applications, whilst at the same time providing a rich user experience. This book also covers topics related to storing data locally as well as explaining how to work with data and services in a Model-View-View-Model (MVVM) architecture. Most of the content is applicable to Windows Phone 7 developers as well; a specific chapter on WP7 development is included in this release. By following the practical recipes in this book, which are of varying difficulty levels, you will learn the concepts needed to create data-rich business applications--from the creation of a Silverlight application, to displaying data in the Silverlight application and applying best practices such as MVVM. Each recipe covers a data services topic, going from the description of the problem, through a conceptual solution to a solution containing sample code.

What you will learn from this book

• Build and maintain data-driven applications easily using the data binding engine, which does most of the work for you
• See how validation can be applied effectively to ensure correct input within your applications
• Use Isolated Storage classes to store data locally, possibly even between sessions, instead of accessing your services for each data need, bringing down the load on your serve
• Learn all about the Model-View-View-Model (MVVM) pattern and how you can access data and services from an MVVM architecture
• Access all kinds of services, including WCF, ASMX, REST, RSS, sockets and more from your Silverlight applications, even if hosted in Windows Azure
• Get a deep knowledge about WCF RIA Services and how you can build your architecture around them
• Build data-driven Windows Phone 7 applications and leverage your knowledge in the mobile platform
• Throughout the book, you'll learn to use XAML & C# to build your LOB applications - skills that can be reused for Windows 8 development

Approach

Written in a cookbook style, this book offers learning and techniques through recipes. It contains step-by-step instructions for developers who want to build rich data-driven business applications using Silverlight or Windows Phone 7. The book is designed in such a way that you can refer to things chapter by chapter, or read them in no particular order.

Who this book is written for

If you are a .NET developer who wants to build professional data-driven applications with Silverlight or Windows Phone 7, then this book is for you. Basic experience of programming Silverlight and familiarity with accessing data using ADO.NET in normal .NET applications is required.

About the Author

Gill Cleeren

Gill Cleeren is Microsoft Regional Director (theregion.com), Silverlight MVP (former ASP.NET MVP) and Telerik MVP. He lives in Belgium where he works as .NET architect at Ordina (ordina.be/). Passionate about .NET, he's always playing with the newest bits. In his role as Regional Director, Gill has given many sessions, webcasts and training on new as well as existing technologies, such as Silverlight, ASP.NET and WPF at conferences including TechEd Berlin 2010, TechDays Belgium - Switzerland - Sweden, DevDays NL, NDC Oslo Norway, DevReach Bulgaria, NRW Conference Germany, Spring Conference UK, Telerik Silverlight Roadshow in Sweden, Telerik RoadShow UK. He is the author of Packt's Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook and is also the author of many articles in various developer magazines and for SilverlightShow.net and he organizes the yearly Community Day event in Belgium. He also leads Visug (visug.be), the largest .NET user group in Belgium. You can find his blog at snowball.be and on Twitter by following gillcleeren

Kevin Dockx

Kevin Dockx lives in Belgium and works at RealDolmen, one of Belgium's biggest ICT companies, where he is a 30-year old technical specialist/project leader on .NET web applications, mainly Silverlight, and a solution manager for Rich Applications (Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, WPF, Surface, HTML5). His main focus is on all things Silverlight, but he still keeps an eye on the new developments concerning other products from the Microsoft .NET (Web) Stack. As a Silverlight enthusiast, he's a regular speaker on various national and international events, like Microsoft DevDays in the Netherlands, Microsoft Techdays in Portugal, NDC Oslo Norway, and Community Day Belgium. He is the author of Packt's Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook and also writes articles for various Silverlight-related sites & magazines. His blog, which contains various tidbits on Silverlight, .NET, and the occasional rambling, can be found at blog.kevindockx.com/, and you can find him on Twitter as well: KevinDockx.

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