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This e-book is based on SilverlightShow 7-part article series ‘Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506’. While the online article series give references to many external resources, several for one topic, in this e-book we picked the best resource covering the topic, and have included it as full text, together with links to source code where available. Note: approximately 85% of the resources selected are available in full, the rest of the resources are still included as links due to lack of copy permissions or inability to reach the the respective authors. 

This e-book collects a total of 100+ articles in full.

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From the author: When Microsoft announced that its new mobile platform, Windows Phone 7, would only be programmable with managed code, there was a loud applause (at least in the room I was in). Developers were keen to utilize their hard-earned knowledge of the .NET framework on the new platform and enjoy the ease of development and familiar tools and workflow on what is the most dynamically advancing area of computing - smartphones. 

Microsoft brought two of its most interesting development frameworks to the phone: XNA and Silverlight. Silverlight developers can also right at home with Windows Phone 7. It is said that if you are already a Silverlight developer, you already know 90% of what is needed for developing Silverlight applications for the phone. This e-book is about the remaining 10%, written by Silverlight MVP and author of the WP7 app “SurfCube 3D Browser”: András “@vbandi” Velvárt. 

Note: this e-book covers Windows Phone 7.0 development. Footnotes have been added where Mango (the upcoming update of Windows Phone 7) is different, but the Mango API is not detailed here.

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This e-book collects the 7 parts of the series 'Windows Phone 7', together with source code.

From the author

Last November Microsoft released its brand new Windows Phone 7 operating system, and many of you may have already bought one of the many models it can be found on the market. If you are, like me, passionate of tech-toys, probably you have already started to play with it, downloading tons of applications from the marketplace and you have permeated your life with the beautiful features of this phone. Now, since if you are reading this pages probably you are also passionate about programming with Silverlight, it is the right moment to get deeply in touch with your phone discovering how you can write your own applications, test them on your device and finally publish them to the marketplace to possibly start earn some money, I'm pretty sure you will use to buy your next toy.

In this e-book we will follow a path to discover one by one all the aspects of this device. I know for sure you may have already read something on Internet but from here I will start from scratch trying to give a full and complete view about what this phone can do and about what you can do with this phone.

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This e-book collects the 2 parts of Walter Ferrari's SilverlightShow article series Discover Sharepoint with Silverlight together with source code.

In this article series Walter Ferrari goes in-depth through the concepts of interacting with Sharepoint objects inside a Silverlight application. He explains how you can steer Sharepoint by using the Silverlight Client Object Model.

He does that by creating an application that can navigate through the hierarchy of the objects exposed by Sharepoint and shows its properties. Through this e-book you will explore, and in a certain way discover Sharepoint using a sort of Silverlight navigator. This would be a good opportunity to learn something on the Sharepoint framework and, at the same time, to become familiar with the Silverlight Client Object Model.

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This e-book collects the 2 parts of SilverlightShow article series 'Silverlight WCF RIA Services: Strategies for handling your Domain Context', together with source code.

A lot of business applications that are being developed in Silverlight today are built with the help of WCF RIA Services. This should come as no surprise, as it’s a really powerful, extensible framework which provides us with a lot of features out of the box (validation, authentication, authorization, …) that otherwise would require quite a lot of custom code, workarounds & plumbing. In WCF RIA Services, you’re going to be working with a client-side Domain Context instance. This e-book will look into a few strategies on working with this Domain Context, and is accompanied by a demo & source code, available in the downloadable package.

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This e-book collects the 2 parts of SilverlightShow article series 'Silverlight in the Azure Cloud' together with source code.

From the author: Cloud computing is a hot topic nowadays. The ability to have access to an unlimited amount of resources when we need it is awesome and can help us deliver better and more stable applications, while keeping the cost low. Many vendors, including Microsoft, Amazon and Google have their own cloud implementations.

Since PDC 2008, Microsoft jumped on the cloud-computing bandwagon and introduced Windows Azure. Microsoft envisions the cloud as the future. There are many great advantages that come with cloud computing, including nearly unlimited scaling, high availability and low cost to get started, all offered by Azure. When combining the power, scalability and high availability of Azure with a rich client platform like Silverlight, we can create even more compelling experiences.

Silverlight works great with Azure and vice versa. From a professional point-of-view, I have for done a few migrations of existing Silverlight applications towards the Azure platform. Moreover, I know use Azure for delivering intermediate builds of my Silverlight projects to the customer, without all the hassle of attaining and installing a server, making it available outside the domain etc. With the tools I have at my disposal for Azure, I can deploy to the cloud in a snap and we only pay for the days the server is online.

This all inspired me to give a webinar on SilverlightShow titled Switching on the cloud for Silverlight, delivered on March 23 2011 and available for on-demand viewing here. While there’s a lot of information in the talk, this e-book will be an extra companion to the webinar. Or maybe you don’t have an hour to spend and just want to read about Silverlight and Azure, well in that case, this e-book will give you the information you need to get started.

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This e-book collects the 3 parts of the series Producing and Consuming OData in a Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Application together with slides and source code.

The Open Data Protocol (OData) is simply an open web protocol for querying and updating data. It allows for the consumer to query the datasource (usually over HTTP) and retrieve the results in Atom, JSON or plain XML format, including pagination, ordering or filtering of the data.

In this e-book, you will learn how to produce an OData Data Source and consume it using Silverlight 4 and Windows Phone 7. You will gain deep understanding of OData and how you may use it in your own applications.

At the beginning of each chapter you may find a link to the source code used throughout the chapter examples, as well as to the chapter slides. All source codes are available inside the e-book package.

In case the original article series gets updated by its author, a revised e-book edition will be released and emailed to everyone who already purchased the e-book.

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This e-book collects all 10 parts of the series WCF RIA Services together with source code. Explore WCF RIA Services with the convenience of a fully offline resource!

In order to build serious business application in Silverlight (and other client technologies), you have to work with a lot of data. And that data is usually not resident on the client machine, it is usually distributed amongst many clients and is stored and operated on by back-end services. 
 
If you try to write this kind of application architecture yourself, you have to tackle a lot of technologies and write a lot of plumbing. In the end, most of what you are doing is pushing and pulling data from the client to the back end and invoking operations on the server from the Silverlight client application. What would be great is if most of that plumbing and push-pull logic could be automated for you, allowing you to just focus on what data you need, the rules that surround the manipulation of that data, and how to present it in the client application.

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This e-book collects the two parts of SilverlightShow article series 'Working with Collections in WCF RIA Services', together with source code.

A lot of business applications today are built with WCF RIA Services (which should come as no surprise, as it’s a really powerful, extensible framework). However, the collection type support could have been better. Often, you’d simply resort to fetching your entities and adding them to an ObservableCollection<T> in the completed event of your load operation. This still works, but in the first Service Pack for WCF RIA Services quite a few enhancements to existing collection types have been made, and new ones have been added. These allow you to make it easier to work with WCF RIA Services in an MVVM context: we now have collections which automatically track your DomainContext, collections which allow you to add filters, sorting & even grouping, and there’s a server-side pageable DomainCollectionView. In this e-book, we’ll have a look at these enhancements & new types, and the scenarios in which they can prove useful.

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This e-book collects all 14 parts of the series 'XNA for Silverlight developers', together with source code. Explore XNA with the convenience of a fully offline resource!

Silverlight is not the only possibility to create software for Windows Phone 7 devices, there's also XNA. Most people that are interested in developing for the new mobile platform probably have already read about it, mostly in the context of game programming. 

This e-book  gives a quick overview of XNA on the mobile platform for Silverlight developers who have not dealt with XNA in detail before. It explains the possibilities of interaction between Silverlight and XNA, and why you as a Silverlight developer should care about XNA even if you don't want to develop games.

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