Product Description

This ebook collects the 7 parts of SilverlightShow article series 'Windows 8 and the Future of XAML', together with source code.

From the author: It’s my goal in this series to introduce you to what we know at this point about Windows 8 and how we as (XAML) developers will need to adapt to the new platform.

Since you’re probably a XAML developer like I am, we are going to see things from a XAML point-of-view. In some of the upcoming articles, I’m going to describe you how you can leverage what you already know in XAML when Windows 8 will be ready. I’m also going to spend time looking at how you can convert existing Silverlight applications to Windows 8 Metro apps, so that they follow the rules of the OS. We will also be spending time of course on digging into the developer framework making the development on Windows 8 easy: Windows Runtime or shorter, WinRT.

Product Description

This ebook collects the first 7 parts of SilverlightShow article series 'Windows 8 Metro', together with source code.

In this first part (2 more parts expected to be released, following the development of the series) Andrea introduces the basic concepts of Windows 8 development, and covers developing your first application, the application life-cycle, the new metro controls and more. 

From the author: In the recent days an epocal change is becoming evident. If you tried to download the new Windows 8 Consumer Preview, available for free on Microsoft website, you know what I mean. The change, that is greatly focused on a new user experience, is driven by the growing power of portable devices that are becoming prevalent on common desktop and laptops. Up to the day before today, tablet PCs, smartphones, and generically speaking touch-enabled devices was expensive and not effective, but they are now something that common people start to take in serious consideration from the effectiveness perspective and also from the economical point of view.

As said, this change is mostly focused on a new user experience due to the fact that there is a shift of the attention from the business software to the consumer market. Never like today the wide availability of consumer application have been important and this, joined with the new touch paradigm requires a completely new set of rules to design the experience and the interaction of the user with your software.

In this series I aim to share my evolving experience with the new Windows 8 Metro Applications. As few people knows I have a graphical background that lives side by side with my programmer soul. During this series I would like to discover most of the wonderful tools behind Metro applications. 

Product Description

A compact certification guide to help you prepare for, and pass, the (70-506): TS: Microsoft Silverlight 4, Development exam

Overview

• This book and e-book will provide all that you need to know to pass the Microsoft Silverlight 4 development (70-506) exam.
• Includes a comprehensive set of test questions and answers
• The layout and content of the book matches that of the skills measured by the exam closely, which makes it easy to focus your learning and maximize your study time where you need improvement.

Product Description

A step-by-step book and eBook guide to creating and running scalable Silverlight 4 Enterprise Applications on the Windows Azure platform

• This book and e-book details how enterprise Silverlight applications can be written to take advantage of the key features of Windows Azure to create scalable applications
• Provides an overview of the Windows Azure platform and how the different technologies can be integrated within your enterprise application
• Examines ways that distributed asynchronous systems can be created to allow scalable processing
• Learn from a distinguished author with tips, tricks, and hands on experience to create scalable enterprise Silverlight applications that run on the Windows Azure platform

Who this book is written for

If you are an application developer who wants to build and run Silverlight Enterprise applications using Azure storage, WCF Services, and ASP providers, then this book is for you. You should have a working knowledge of Silverlight and Expression Blend. However, knowledge of Azure is not required since the book covers how to integrate the two technologies in detail.

Product Description

This e-book collects the 4 parts of SilverlightShow article series 'Creating the SilverlightShow Windows Phone Application' authored by Peter Kuhn.

From the author: At the end of February, the official SilverlightShow Windows Phone app has been accepted into the Marketplace. The app gives you access to some of the content of this website, including news, articles and events, and is completely free for use (also ad-free!). Some of the convenience features include the possibility to create reminders for upcoming events and webinars directly on your phone, to get notifications about new content in the form of live tiles, and to maintain a local list of favorites that allows you to permanently store items for later reading. If you haven’t checked out the app yet, you can find more details and a quick intro video here, or visit its Marketplace page here.

The creation of the app was an interesting experience, because unlike other phone projects I had worked on in the past, this one wasn’t a greenfield development. Obviously the SilverlightShow portal already existed, had a long-established production infrastructure and already a lot of existing content available.

Product Description

This e-book collects all 4 parts of the series Working with Prism 4, together with source code.


From the author: Prism has a number of specific feature sets that I will explore in this series that helps you to build your client application as a composite application. These include:

• Modularity – Functionality to define and dynamically load chunks of loosely coupled functionality into a single running application instance.
• UI Composition – Functionality to plug in views into parent containers in a loosely coupled fashion where the parent and child do not need to know explicitly about one another with direct object references.
• Communications – Functionality to support loosely coupled commands and pub/sub events between the components of your application.
• Navigation – Functionality to switch views when the user interacts with the application within a container without every view and parent view needing to know about all the others.

An important thing to understand about Prism is that it is not an all-or-nothing framework. You can use any one or several of the features in isolation and ignore the other parts if they do not make sense for your application or your requirements. In addition to these major features, there are many small little helper classes and utilities in Prism that can be used on their own as well.

Over 40 recipes for storing, managing, and manipulating data in Windows Phone 7.5 Mango applications.

• Simple data binding recipes to advanced recipes for building scalable applications
• Techniques for managing application data in Windows Phone mango apps
• On-device data storage, cloud storage and API interaction

In Detail

Windows Phone 7.5 Mango contains support for apps written in Silverlight or XNA. These apps can store data on the device, and also load and manipulate data from "the cloud" and other web services.

This Windows Phone 7.5 Data Cookbook has a range of recipes to help you apply data handling concepts. You will be able to apply the knowledge gained from these recipes to build your own apps effectively.

This Windows Phone 7.5 Data Cookbook starts with data binding concepts at the UI layer and then shows different ways of saving data locally and externally in databases. The book ends with a look at the popular MVVM software design pattern. The recipes contained in this book will make you an expert in the areas of data access and storage.

Who this book is written for

The book is written in a cookbook style, presenting examples in the style of recipes, allowing you to go directly to your topic of interest, or follow topics throughout a chapter to gain in-depth knowledge.