Product Description

Develop a full LOB Microsoft Silverlight 5 application from scratch with the help of expert advice and an accompanying case study using this book and eBook

• Dive straight into Silverlight 5 with the advanced techniques in this expert guide
• Fully up-to-date content for Silverlight 5 and RIA Services SP2
• Complete your knowledge with a gradually built upon case study with this book and e-book

In Detail

Microsoft Silverlight is fully established as a powerful tool for creating and delivering Rich Internet Applications and media experiences on the Web. This book will help you dive straight into utilizing Silverlight 5, which now more than ever is a top choice in the Enterprise for building Business Applications.

"Expert Line of Business Application Development for Silverlight 5: Quick Start Guide" focuses on the development of a complete Silverlight 5 LOB application, helping you to take advantage of the powerful features available along with expert advice.

Fully focused on LOB development, this expert guide takes you from the beginning of designing and implementing a Silverlight 5 LOB application, all the way through to completion. Accompanied by a gradually built upon case study, you will learn about data access via RIA and Web services, architecture with MEF and MVVM applied to LOB development, testing and error control, and much more.

With "Expert Line of Business Application Development for Silverlight 5: Quick Start Guide" in hand, you will be fully equipped to expertly develop your own Silverlight Line of Business application, without dwelling on the basics of Enterprise Silverlight development.

Buy from:

Product Description

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.

..

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.

Buy from:

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.

Buy from:

Product Description

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.

Buy from:

Product Description

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.

Buy from:

Product Description

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.

Buy from:

Product Description

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.

Buy from:

Product Description

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.

Buy from:

Product Description

Buy from:

Product Description

Silverlight 4 has the potential to revolutionize the way we build business applications. With its flexibility, web deployment, cross-platform capabilities, rich .NET language support on the client, rich user interface control set, small runtime, and more, it comes close to the perfect platform in which to build business applications. It’s a very powerful technology, and despite its youth, it’s moving forward at a rapid pace and is gaining widespread adoption.

This book will guide you through the process of designing and developing enterprise-strength business applications in Silverlight 4 and C#. You will learn how to take advantage of the power of Silverlight to develop rich and robust business applications, from getting started to deployment, and everything in between.

In particular, this book will serve developers who want to learn how to design business applications, and introduce the patterns to use, the issues that you’ll face, and how to resolve them. Chris Anderson, who has been building line-of-business applications for years, demonstrates his experience through a candid presentation of how to tackle real-life issues, rather than just avoid them. Developers will benefit from his hard-won expertise through business application design patterns that he shares throughout the book.

 

Buy from: