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.

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This ebook collects the first 3 parts of Walter Ferrari's SilverlightShow article series Silverlight and SharePoint Working Together. More parts coming soon. All customers receive an updated ebook copy within one day from a new chapter release.

From the author: With this I am starting out a series focused on finding the best way to have these two technologies (Sharepoint and Silverlight) working together. In this ebook we will explore some possible ways to make Silverlight work with some of the features of Sharepoint including the less known ones.
What we'll cover in this ebook:

• Cover the three techniques to Silverlight in Sharepoint. Recently Microsoft came out with a Visual Studio extension to facilitate this process, details here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/pstubbs/archive/2011/04/04/add-silverlight-web-parts-to-sharepoint-using-new-visual-studio-extension.aspx 
• Interaction between Sharepoint sites and Windows Phone 7: what is at disposal out of the box, what are the issues, how to build applications that take advantage from both the platforms etc
• Sharepoint has a feature called "quick launch menu" which is a pre-build navigation system; the series will explain how to build a Silverlight menu which uses the same enigne of the "quick launch menu"
• Experimenting Sharepoint with Silverlight 5 especially with regard to OOB apps

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Product Description 

This book illustrates more than 100 features in Silverlight using a simple problem/solution approach. It takes one feature at a time and guides you in progressive journey where you begin by using the basic components, then by creating graphics and animations. You then create rich media applications on the client and web services, and delve into calling advanced Web services like AJAX, REST and WCF services from Silverlight. The book takes an example approach for all problems and features, and illustrates with class diagrams what objects and methods are used and how the elements of a Silverlight project are created in easy to understand format. In the Book * Design a Rich Internet Application * Extend the Control Framework * Create Compelling Graphics * Work with Animation * Extend the Browser Programming Model * Bring Data Visualization to the Web * Develop with ASP.NET and Ajax * Work with Web Services * Create Rich Silverlight Media Applications * Deliver Enhanced and Interactive Streaming Video Experiences The book assumes the reader has a basic understanding of web technologies and .Net programming languages, and is targeted at the intermediate to advanced Silverlight developer.

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This ebook collects the two parts of SilverlightShow article series Authorization in Silverlight, together with source code.

From the author: As we know, Silverlight is very capable platform for building Line of Business applications today, both in and out of the browser. It’s come to the point that – at least in my experience – a lot of desktop applications are now built with Silverlight instead of WinForms, skipping over WPF completely.

With that in mind, it’s pretty weird that there’s an essential part that seems to be missing: authentication & authorization. When you look at the Silverlight Core CLR, there’s not much there concerning this – although it’s a no-brainer for business and enterprise applications: you need to make sure certain parts of your application are only available to users that are authenticated or have a specific role. Sure, you can use the hosting web page & ASP .NET authentication to ensure only authenticated persons can reach your Silverlight application, but there’s no out of the box way to enable or block a user from navigating to a specific view in your application.

Luckily, it only requires a little bit of coding and all in all: it’s quite easy to enable authenticated & authorized navigation in your Silverlight applications, mainly thanks to the introduction of a new class in Silverlight 4: the custom content loader.

In this ebook, we’ll look into enabling scenarios to enable/disable certain parts of your application for authenticated users, and to automatically ask the user for his credentials if he’s trying to access a part of the application that requires him to be authenticated or to have a specific role.

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Product Description

This e-book is based on SilverlightShow 8-part article series 'Developing Real-world Applications with LightSwitch’.

From the author:

In 2010, Microsoft announced LightSwitch, a product aimed at developing Line-of-Business applications with ease. In July 2011, the beta tag was finally removed from the product as Microsoft officially introduced Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 as a new member of the Visual Studio family. Many however are still unsure about the product. Questions crossing a lot of minds include “Is it something for me?”, “What can I do with it?”, “Where should I use it?”, “Is it more than Microsoft Access?”, “Am I limited to what’s in the box?” and quite a few more.

For this reason, I have decided that a few articles should be in place to give you a clear understanding of LightSwitch. I won’t be saying that you should LightSwitch for this or that. Using a sample application we will build throughout the series, I will try giving you an overview of how we can use it to build a real-world application. By reading these articles, I hope you’ll be able to make up your mind whether or not LightSwitch is something for you.

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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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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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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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