Demos

Introduction

Silverlight 2 has introduced many interesting features and controls but it misses something that Silverlight 3 makes possible –easily creating and manipulating rich data forms. These series of posts will help you when creating rich data forms in Silverlight 3 in your projects. Silverlight 3 introduces a new control, called DataForm. It enables various methods for display, edit, update and navigation through data.

The DataForm control is like the DataGrid control in Silverlight 2. But while the DataGrid control is used to manipulate a list of items, the DataForm control focuses on the item itself.

Introduction

In Part 7.1 of this series I looked at the importance of styling your Silverlight applications. In this article I will be taking a look at fashions in user interface design of late, and what basic elements can be identified as working towards beautiful and functional applications. Also I will address some of the “controversy” from my previous article and provide some opinions and responses to the comments I received.

Before we start, I have a disclaimer. I’m a developer, not a graphics designer – so I’m writing these styling articles from a developer’s perspective (and with the same limited graphical design skills many other developers share).

Introduction

In this previous article we added a DomainDataSource control in our application and bounded it to a DataGrid and with their help we easily visualized our data. Now we are going to implement some more goodies into the application - sorting and filtering. We achieve that via the DomainDataSource control, as it provides such functionality and is really simple to use.

Here are some links to the previous articles if you have missed them:

Creating applications with .NET RIA Services Part 1 - Introduction

Creating applications with .NET RIA Services Part 2 - Creating the project

Creating applications with .NET RIA Services Part 3 - Adding a DomainService class

Creating applications with .NET RIA Services Part 4 - Adding a DomainDataSource

Here is a link to the live demo at this stage and the source code. Note that they will be updated with each article! ;)

Introduction

Yes, I was searching for months if there is any possibility to simple justify block text! And I didn’t find anything – except lots of posts like: “Why didn’t they implement it?”!

So I waited for Silverlight 3 Beta 1 to appear, and I began to hope and pray, but: Once again – there was nothing like block text. I was very disappointed. How should I display long text on the screen without clear formatting borders on both sides - and I don’t want to mix Silverlight and HTML again, either. I need this for building a web application composed of 100% Silverlight, and I don’t feel like doing the text-rendering and position-calculation by myself.

Introduction

Silverlight 3 beta is out and it introduces a great variety of new functionality. Tim Heuer has already published a guide to the new features in Silverlight 3.

Element effects in Silverlight 2 are missing. This means that if you want to make your elements more attractive, you have to write your own effects. Silverlight.FX introduced a great number of effects and animations, which you can use. Nikhil Kothari has written a number of posts to show you the capabilities of this small but powerful framework.

Introduction

By now we have discussed the preparations around the project, how to add a DomainService that contains our business logic and combine it with the entity framework. If you have missed one of the previous articles you can find them here:

Creating applications with .NET RIA Services Part 1 - Introduction

Creating applications with .NET RIA Services Part 2 - Creating the project

Creating applications with .NET RIA Services Part 3 - Adding a DomainService class

As you know from the previous articles in order to demonstrate the features of the .NET RIA Services I am creating the Web Administration Tool from ASP.NET in Silverlight. In this article I am going to create the Manage Users page and add the functionality needed to visualize Data. For that purpose I will need the DataGrid control, the new DataPager control and the DomainDataSource that is a part of the .NET RIA Services framework.

Here is a link to the live demo at this stage and the source code. Note that they will be updated with each article! ;)

Introduction

With the beta release of Silverlight 3 a lot of new goodies were introduced and one of them was the navigation framework and in the final release additional features were added. It allows us to easily implement navigation between the newly introduced Page controls in a Silverlight application, interacts with the Browser History journal and provides us with Uri mapping. To learn more about these features read on the article.

For this article the demo will be the Mini SilverlightShow application, which I used not a long time ago as a demo to my article about the Telerik's RadPageNavigation control.

Introduction

In Part 6 of this series I looked at implementing a means for displaying reports that appear to be within the application and permitting them to be printed. In each of the articles so far I have discussed major components of line of business application development, but have spent little or no time in styling the application in anticipation of writing an article dedicated to doing so. However that article has turned into seven articles which will become a mini-series within this existing series.

Introduction

This article continues the series of articles about the .NET RIA Services framework and Silverlight 3. The scope of it is the DomainService class, which is used to create the business logic of the application and how it combines with the ADO.NET Data Model and the Enitity framework.

Here is a link to the live demo at this stage and the source code. Note that they will be updated with each article! ;)

Here are links to the previous parts of the series:

Creating applications with .NET RIA Service  Part 1 - Introduction

Creating applications with .NET RIA Service  Part 2 - Creating the project

Introduction

With the help of the .NET RIA Services framework we are now capable of creating business applications in Silverlight easy and fast. But before starting we should download and install the latest versions of Silverlight 3 and .NET RIA Services. In this article you'll find the needed links and a brief walkthrough of creating the project for our first Silverlight application using the .NET RIA Services Framework, as well as some highlights and explanations about the created project.

Here is a link to the live demo at this stage and the source code. Note that they will be updated with each article! ;)

Here is a link to the first part of the series:

Creating applications with .NET RIA Service  Part 1 - Introduction

.NET RIA Services and Silverlight 3

Before beginning to code your first application, you have to download and install the Silverlight 3 Tools for Visual Studio, which contain the tools, the runtime and the SDK.