Product Description

While nearly one million developers now use Silverlight, most existing guidance remains simple and introductory. Enterprise developers need repeatable best practices and patterns to help them build line-of-business Silverlight solutions more quickly and effectively. This book delivers those practices and patterns, together with state-of-the-art Silverlight 5 code that demonstrates exactly how to use them. Two-time Microsoft Silverlight MVP and long-time Wintellect consultant Jeremy Likness draws on his unsurpassed experience building large-scale commercial applications with Silverlight. Likness guides readers step-by-step through building highly-scalable and modular Silverlight solutions that take full advantage of Enterprise Silverlight, Modular Silverlight, MVVM, and the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF). Throughout, Likness presents rich code examples in the context of real, production-quality Silverlight case study applications. His code and best practices solve a wide range of complex problems, including: *Transporting data more efficiently *Sharing behaviors between clients and servers more effectively and seamlessly *Creating modular extensions that load on demand *Debugging and profiling large-scale Silverlight systems more successfully. Code samples are written and tested with Silverlight 5 but many of the concepts are applicable to previous versions of Silverlight. Likness also provides a rich glossary and references for using Silverlight even more successfully

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Silverlight has revolutionized development using Microsoft technologies. It is an excellent tool for mobile application development. The XAML-based markup and familiar C# code are the perfect combination for building apps efficiently and with minimum hassle.

Packed full of recipes containing comprehensive instructions for the tasks required to build modern compelling smartphone apps using Silverlight.

Starting with application design and architecture, you will quickly move on to more technical features and APIs you can implement to make your app stand out. You will use the Camera API to scan barcode, location services to pinpoint the user’s GPS coordinates and accelerometer to provide feedback based on movement of the phone. All of these features can be provided in a slick user interface through the power of Silverlight. Animations, behaviors and XAML provide all you need and more.

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Coming soon...

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This book offers everything you'll need to upgrade your existing programming knowledge and begin to develop applications for the Windows Phone 7. 

It focuses on the 75 percent of the material that you will need 95 percent of the time. We're not going to teach you object-oriented programming (OOP) all over again, but we are going to take the time to point out how .NET and C# differ in their execution of the standard OOP concepts from other languages' implementations in order to make your migration as smooth and stress-free as possible.

Migrating to Windows Phone 7 will lead you through a tour of the key features of developing for Microsoft's devices. We'll consider everything from data handling to accelerometers, from mapping to WCF. We'll also walk you through monetizing your application through Microsoft's online Windows Phone 7 store.

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Product Description

The complete guide to programming the entire breakthrough Windows Mobile 7 platform: timed to catch the initial wave of demand! 

 

Focuses on helping readers get started fast, and deliver highly competitive applications that gain first-mover advantage

Teaches through complete example apps that illuminate each key concept with fully-explained code and real-world context

By Daniel Vaughan, a high-profile expert in advanced WPF and Silverlight development, and Microsoft MVP in Client Application Development 

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Product Description

This e-book collects the 2 parts of Walter Ferrari's SilverlightShow article series Building a DataGrid Control for Silverlight for Windows Phone together with source code.


As you probably know there is no DataGrid available under the Silverlight for Windows Phone platform at the moment. One could object that a DataGrid in Windows Phone is not so much requested for a lot of reasons, size of the screen, user input mode etc. This is true but it is also true that new projects regarding local databases appear day by day on the horizon (i.e. Perst for WP7 , Windows Phone 7 Database) and this opens the space for the development of a class of business applications, even for small devices. With this scenario a specialized UI control to visualize data becomes significant. The challenge here is to build a control which is at the same time clear, understandable and easy-to-use.

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This e-book collects the 2 parts of SilverlightShow article series 'The Validation Story in Silverlight', together with source code.


If one feature is important when it comes to building line-of-business applications, it certainly is validation of business rules. At all levels throughout the application, we need to validate that the data that is entered by the users to verify that it meets the requirements. Some basic validation can be done by the database itself, but most (and in many cases, all) data that it trying to make its way to the database should be validated up front in order not to end up with corrupted data within the data store.

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The validation story in Silverlight up until version 4 was somewhat lacking in features. While Silverlight 3 had some options available, they were not really enough for real-world applications. That changed with Silverlight 4, mainly because of the introduction of 2 new interfaces, namely the IDataErrorInfo and the INotifyDataErrorInfo. The first one may sound familiar as it already exists for WinForms validation. The latter will be helpful in situations where we need to perform calls to the server and return asynchronous validation results.

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This e-book collects the three parts of SilverlightShow article series 'Caching of, in, and around your Silverlight application', together with source code.

Let’s start with a general definition of caching: this is what Wikipedia has to say about this technique:

In computer science, a cache is a component that improves performance by transparently storing data such that future requests for that data can be served faster. ... (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caching)

Well, that sure opens up a lot of possible places to cache, in and outside of your Silverlight application. Can you cache the complete Silverlight application? What’s this assembly caching you keep on reading about? How do you go about keeping your data on the client when navigating to different parts of you application, instead of refetching it all the time? Can you leverage the Isolated Storage for caching, and is it possible to persist data in between different application sessions? Is it possible to share cached items between different Silverlight applications? And what about the server-side: can I minimize database hits when launching queries from my Silverlight application?

If you’ve ever asked yourself one (or more) of these questions, this e-book is for you. As you might notice when seeing them in the same paragraph, these questions are about different ways of caching, and they all apply to different scenarios.

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This e-book collects all 3 parts of the series 'The Duplex Story: Looking at Duplex Communication in Silverlight', together with source code.

Silverlight offers us many choices to work with services to get data into our applications. Supported technologies include WCF, ASMX, REST, WCF RIA Services etc. Through the use of any of these, it’s quite easy to get data from the server to the client application and vice versa. They all have one thing in common: before the data is sent, the client has to perform a request to the server to do so. The communication is known to be client-initiated.

But what if the server wants to initiate communication by sending some data to the client, without there being a request first? In this case, we need to use duplex communication, so that both sides of the communication channel can start sending data.

In this 3 chapter e-book, we’ll look at the options that Silverlight has on board to perform duplex communication. Inside each chapter you may find a link to the source code used throughout the chapter examples. All source codes are available with this e-book package.

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Product Description

This e-book collects all 5 parts of SilverlightShow article series 'Beginners Guide to Visual Studio LightSwitch', by Silverlight MVP Kunal Chowdhury.

From the author: Visual Studio LightSwitch is a new tool for building data-driven Silverlight Application using Visual Studio IDE. It automatically generates the User Interface for a DataSource without writing any code. You can write a small amount of code also to meet your requirement.

Recently, I got some time to explore Visual Studio LightSwitch. I created a small DB application with proper data inserting UI within a small amount of time (without any XAML or C# code). Here in this e-book, I will guide you to understand it with the help of a small application. Read the complete e-book to learn about creating a Silverlight data driven application with the help of Visual Studio LightSwitch.

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Product Description

This e-book collects the 3 parts of SilverlightShow article series 'Data Driven Applications with MVVM', together with source code. Explore MVVM with the convenience of a fully offline resource!

From the author:

This e-book covers what MVVM is and how to use it in practice, how to solve issues when applying this pattern and how to take advantage from it.

What is MVVM and why you need it

Do you know the feeling, when you start to develop an application, and in the first couple of days you feel good because you made a really good progress? Do you know the feeling, when after a couple of days, you feel that your design is not that best and when you have to modify a little code, you are afraid of the effect it might have on other parts of you code? The first sign of a bad design is when applying a hack is easier than to implement it the proper way. At the end of the week you already have spaghetti code. You have logic that is not testable, it is very tightly coupled with the UI. You cannot make just “minor” changes without taking risks. If someone wants to understand your code, it takes days or weeks to figure out how it works.

This is where MVVM comes into play. MVVM stands for the Model – View – ViewModel pattern. It’s originated from MVC and is specific to WPF and Silverlight. The three most important things that MVVM can offer you:

• Testable code
• UI is loosely coupled with related logic
• Maintainable code

Inside each chapter you may find a link to the source code used throughout the chapter examples. All source codes are available inside the e-book package.

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