SilverlightShow: Silverlight Community

Windows Store apps with XAML and HTML - Part 2: Ebook

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Andrea Boschin ) — Fri, 04 Oct 2013 12:22:54 GMT

Product Description

This is the second part of Andrea Boschin's ebook 'Windows Store apps with XAML and HTML'.

From the author:

In this second part of the ebook, I'm showing a number of features implemented by both html5 and xaml. The purpose of this ebook is to enable people to easily migrate from a platform to the other when a customer requires an implementation in the language that is not yours. I'm really confident that this ebook will not move anyone from html to xaml or viceversa just because, as I'm strongly trained with xaml and I manage to use it every time I can just because it makes me fast as the light, someone may have the opposite feel. So I hope you may find useful reading these words and they help you to cross the line that separated these two representations of the same story.

Contents:

Chapter 1: Win as one with Share contracts
Exploring the sharing contract: the share source
And the share target
A great opportunity to sare time and improve ux.

Chapter 2: Handle settings
Not only for settings.
Displaying the settings
Programmatically open the pane

Chapter 3: Work with style(s)
Styles: how they work
Use styles for application theme
Always create pages with styles

Chapter 4: Application bars, flyouts and other amenities
The AppBar "surface"
Popups vs Flyouts
Context Menus
Have surfaces under control

Chapter 5: Animations and transitions
XAML and HTML: two different ways
Handling the lifetime.
Taking advantage of animation and transitions

Chapter 6: Organize your UI layer in XAML
MVVM: anyone don't know?
A simple example
Map Events to commands
Waiting for HTML

Chapter 7: Organize your UI layer in HTML
Meet Knockout JS
Apply Knockout JS to Windows Store apps
Conclusions

About the author:

Andrea Boschin is a Silverlight MVP from Italy who currently lives and works in Treviso, a beautiful town near Venice. He started to work in the IT relatively late after doing some various jobs like graphic designer and school teacher. Finally he started to work into the web and learned by himself to program in VB and ASP and later in C# and ASP.NET. Since the start of his work, Andrea found he likes to learn new technologies and take them into the real world. This happened with ASP.NET, the source of his first two MVP awards, and recently with Silverlight, that he started to use from the v1.0 in some real projects.

Andrea blogs at http://silverlightplayground.org/ and tweets from @aboschin.

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Windows Store apps with XAML and HTML: Ebook

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Andrea Boschin ) — Fri, 04 Oct 2013 12:16:54 GMT

Product Description

This ebook collects the 6 parts of SilverlightShow article series on developing Windows Store apps with XAML and HTML.

From the author: I know, as a XAML developer, you are probably confident that you own the better way for writing stunning interfaces, with a productive timing, a consistent toolset and a powerful language like C# that is a sweet juice. I'm also pretty sure that HTML people is completely confortable on its side and do not feel the need of moving to another language. Unfortunately, landing on the real world, these strong reasons are not so strong for all the people, and often you are forced to rely on something you'd not use under normal conditions, as an example because your customer has some constraints that prevent you from use your consolidated XAML or HTML5 knowledge but wants the other.

It's the main reason that convinced me to improve my knowledge in the HTML way to the Windows Store apps - also if I'm totally productive with the XAML side - together with personal will of being aware of all the technologies in my scope. During this exploration I've always kept my XAML knowledge as a guide to understand how the HTML apps works and I found that, under the hoods, the things are not so different and I think that someone may go on the same path backward from HTML to XAML, reading this ebook.

Contents:

Chapter 1: Understand the projects
Building the project
Working with Style(s)
So different, so similar

Chapter 2: Layout elements into the page
Put elements into the page
Handling ViewStates changes
Moving forward

Chapter 3: Controls to the max
Using a control in XAML and HTML
Create your own controls
It's someway complex in XAML

Chapter 4: Handling asynchronous operations
The hard way of the asynchronous programming
I made a promise...
One step forward: C#
Multiple tasks
Async is better

Chapter 5: Using Typescript in Windows Store apps
Typescript, what’s this?
Typescript for the Windows Store apps?
Let's start coding...
Writing logic with Typescript

Chapter 6: Writing C# components for the Windows Srore apps
Why to build Windows Runtime Component
Creating a component
Limitations
Conclusion

About the author:

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Windows 8 Apps - The 8 Must-Know Tricks: Ebook

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Samidip Basu ) — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 17:37:15 GMT

Product Description

This e-book collects the 8 parts of SilverlightShow article series 'Windows 8 Apps - The 8 Must-Know Tricks'.

From the author:

One of the promises of Windows 8 is to be the next iteration of the most popular computer OS. Be excited, as this is the biggest & boldest change in Windows since 95 and there is a lot in it for developers. If you are a .NET developer, the programming paradigms in Windows 8 Metro apps should be very interesting, with fragments of it boiling over to other .NET development. XAML devs should feel right at home, as should web folks with strong HTML/JS/CSS skills. Metro apps are fun to write, in my opinion, and there is a huge potential to make a name for yourself when the Windows Store opens with Windows 8.

I have had the superb pleasure of working on several Windows 8 Enterprise LOB Metro apps for proof-of-concept, along with some very talented internal developers/designers. Unfortunately, that also means NDA and not being able to talk about stuff yet. But what I can do is share some coding experiences, since there is a decent learning curve. I will try to keep the articles short for readability & jump into what you need to make your first Windows 8 Metro app.

So, here is a series on common tips & tricks towards developing real-world Windows 8 Metro apps. We'll talk about some must-do things for Windows 8 Metro app developers. Simple, to the point, with some code examples on XAML/C# stack.

About the author:

Samidip Basu (@samidip) is a technologist & gadget-lover working as a Manager & Solutions Lead for Sogeti out of the Columbus OH Unit. Having worked on WP7 since CTP days, he now spends much of his time in spreading the word to discover the full potential of the Windows Phone platform & cloud-based mobile solutions in general. He passionately runs the Central Ohio Windows Phone User Group (http://cowpug.org/) and can be found with atleast a couple of hobbyist projects at any time. His spare times call for travel and culinary adventures with the wife. Find out more at http://samidipbasu.com/

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Windows 8 and the Future of XAML: Ebook

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Gill Cleeren ) — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 16:27:59 GMT

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.

Contents:

Chapter 1: An overview of the Windows 8 platform
Part 1: An overview of the Windows 8 platform
Let’s BUILD… and all the panic
BUILD hardware and software announcements
Exploring Windows 8 and Metro-style apps

Chapter 2: The Windows Runtime (WinRT)
Hello World… sorry, WinRT
WinRT architecture
Windows Metadata
Language projections
The runtime broker
Being async
What’s in WinRT

Chapter 3: Using WinRT
Hello World… This time for real
Hello Visual Studio
Hello C++
And why not… Hello JavaScript and HTML
More WinRT
Selecting files on the local file system using the FileOpenPicker
Accessing the picture library and Capabilities

Chapter 4: Contracts in WinRT/Windows 8
Contracts: what are they
The Search contract from the developer perspective
Adding the declaration for search
React to search activation
Reacting to submitting queries

Chapter 5: More contracts in WinRT/Windows 8
We love sharing
The share contract
Making your application a share source

Chapter 6: Tiles, toasts and badges
The concepts of tiles
Tiles: basic ones and live ones
Basic tiles
Live tiles
Secondary tiles
Badges
Notifications

Chapter 7: The application lifecycle of Windows 8 applications
Breaking with a tradition
The process lifetime in detail
Launching an app in Windows 8
Launching the app through searching
Launching the app through sharing
Running code in the background
Ebook summary

About the author:

Gill Cleeren is Microsoft Regional Director (www.theregion.com), Silverlight MVP (former ASP.NET MVP) and Telerik MVP. He lives in Belgium where he works as .NET architect at Ordina (http://www.ordina.be/). Passionate about .NET, he’s always playing with the newest bits. In his role as Regional Director, Gill has given many sessions, webcasts and trainings on new as well as existing technologies, such as Silverlight, ASP.NET and WPF at conferences including TechEd Berlin 2010, TechDays Belgium – Switzerland - Sweden, DevDays NL, NDC Oslo Norway, SQL Server Saturday Switzerland, Spring Conference UK, Silverlight Roadshow in Sweden, Telerik RoadShow UK… He’s also the author of many articles in various developer magazines and for SilverlightShow.net and he organizes the yearly Community Day event in Belgium. He also leads Visug (www.visug.be), the largest .NET user group in Belgium. Gill is the author of “Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook”. In 2012, the second edition, “Silverlight 5 Data and Services Cookbook” was released.

You can find his blog at www.snowball.be. Twitter: @gillcleeren

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Introduction to Windows 8 Metro Part 1: Ebook

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Andrea Boschin ) — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 14:05:46 GMT

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.

Contents:

Chapter 1: Create your apps with simplicity in mind
The art of remove instead of add
The pillars of Metro Style
Be authentically digital
Do more with less
Be fast and fluid
Show pride in craftsmanship
Win as one.
Don't be afraid of emptiness

Chapter 2: Starting your first App from scratch
Meet the Visual Studio IDE
Create and understand the project structure
Create your first app
Deploy and run
Moving forward to the next step

Chapter 3: Layout, view states and navigation
Navigate your apps...
Layout and ViewState
An important argument

Chapter 4: Something about application life-cycle
It is matter of life or suspension
The developer point of view
Debugging suspension

Chapter 5: Asynchrony made easy
The pitfall of asynchronous programming
Tasks to the rescue
Playing with tasks
Something has disappeared

Chapter 6: Dealing with new metro controls
Understand those three
Enable Grouping
Using ItemPanel
Do your experiments

Chapter 7: Using advanced tiles API
Introducing Semantic Zoom
Loading items incrementally.

About the author:Andrea Boschin is a Silverlight MVP from Italy who currently lives and works in Treviso, a beautiful town near Venice. He started to work in the IT relatively late after doing some various jobs like graphic designer and school teacher. Finally he started to work into the web and learned by himself to program in VB and ASP and later in C# and ASP.NET. Since the start of his work, Andrea found he likes to learn new technologies and take them into the real world. This happened with ASP.NET, the source of his first two MVP awards, and recently with Silverlight, that he started to use from the v1.0 in some real projects.

Andrea blogs at http://silverlightplayground.org/ and tweets from @aboschin.

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MCTS: Microsoft Silverlight 4 Development (70-506) Certification Guide

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Johnny Tordgeman ) — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 13:30:43 GMT

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.

In Detail

Microsoft Silverlight is a powerful development platform for creating engaging, interactive applications for many screens across the Web, desktop, and mobile devices. Silverlight is also a great (and growing) Line-Of-Business platform and is increasingly being used to build data-driven business applications. Silverlight is based on familiar .NET languages such as C# which enables existing .NET developers to get started developing rich internet applications almost immediately.

"MCTS: Microsoft Silverlight 4 Development (70-506) Certification Guide" will show you how to prepare for and pass the (70-506): TS: Microsoft Silverlight 4 Development exam.

Packed with practical examples and Q&As, MCTS: Microsoft Silverlight 4 Development (70-506) Certification Guide starts by showing you how to lay out a user interface, enhance the user interface, implement application logic, work with data and interact with a host platform amongst others.

What will you learn from this book

Learn how to lay out a user interface in Silverlight using concepts such as panels, content controls and navigation.
Discover how to enhance your UI by manipulating visuals, creating animations and other important UI concepts.
Understand how to implement application logic and work with data to create a powerful data driven line of business applications.
Know how to structure your application and how it can interact with its host platform.
Learn how to configure, deliver and deploy your Silverlight application and how to dynamically load resources upon request.

Approach

This book is a hands-on certification guide with practical examples and Q&As to help .NET developers prepare for and pass the (70-506): TS: Microsoft Silverlight 4 Development exam.

Who this book is written for

If you are a .NET developer who wants to create and maintain rich interactive applications (RIA) using Silverlight 4, then this book is for you. Basic experience of Silverlight development, Microsoft .NET development, and consuming data services is required.

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Microsoft Silverlight 5 and Windows Azure Enterprise Integration

editorial@silverlightshow.net (David Burela ) — Tue, 29 May 2012 15:44:46 GMT

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

In Detail

Microsoft Silverlight is a powerful development platform for creating rich media applications and line of business applications for the web and desktop.

Microsoft Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting, and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform.

Silverlight allows you to integrate with Windows Azure and create and run Silverlight Enterprise Applications on Windows Azure.

This book shows you how to create and run Silverlight Enterprise Applications on Windows Azure.

Integrating Silverlight and Windows Azure can be difficult without guidance. This book will take you through all the steps to create and run Silverlight Enterprise Applications on the Windows Azure platform. The book starts by providing the steps required to set up the development environment, providing an overview of Azure. The book then dives deep into topics such as hosting Silverlight applications in Azure, using Azure Queues in Silverlight, storing data in Azure table storage from Silverlight, accessing Azure blob storage from Silverlight, relational data with SQL Azure and RIA, and manipulating data with RIA services amongst others.

What you will learn from this book

Understand federated authentication and how it can be used with your enterprise's on premise Active Directory, or integrated to allow logins through Google, Yahoo, LiveId, or Facebook
Learn the components that make up the Azure platform and know which components to use in each of your applications
Understand how to partition your relational database into shards to improve scalability and performance
Discover how to use frameworks such as WCF RIA Services to speed up the development of your line of business applications
Learn how to configure your development environment quickly by using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer
Deploy your enterprise applications onto Windows Azure servers
Use AppFabric caching to improve the performance of your applications
Understand what Azure Storage is, how it compares to SQL Azure, and when to choose one over the other
Expose your data via OData to allow Silverlight, javascript, and other web enabled technologies to access and query your data

Approach

This book is a step-by-step tutorial that shows you how to obtain the necessary toolset to create and run Silverlight Enterprise Applications on Azure. The book also covers techniques, practical tips, hints, and tricks for Silverlight interactions with Azure. Each topic is written in an easy-to-read style, with a detailed explanation given and then practical step-by-step exercises with a strong emphasis on real-world relevance.

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.

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Creating SilverlightShow Windows Phone App: Ebook

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Peter Kuhn ) — Fri, 18 May 2012 15:31:07 GMT

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.

During the course of developing the application, we thought it would be a nice idea to share some of the experiences with the SilverlightShow readers, because it is a nice example of discussing a real-world application, with real-world problems (and solutions :)). The idea of this series of articles and ebook was born, where you will discover both details about the development process as well as some technical challenges we came across.

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Working with Prism 4: E-book

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Brian Noyes ) — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 15:00:52 GMT

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.

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Windows Phone 7.5 Data Cookbook

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Ramesh Thalli ) — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 12:20:59 GMT

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.

What you will learn from this book

Create data binding to user interface elements with any data source
Create and save user settings to local isolated storage for later consumption
Explore different on device database options such as commercial Perst, open source SQL CE and Microsoft's SQL CE
Create and consume simple web services and understand LINQ features.
Understand REST and call different social media services like Twitter and RSS Feeds.
Create and understand MVVM model.

Approach

This book is for developers who want to build data-driven apps, or a line of business applications using the Windows Phone platform. It is also useful for developers on other mobile platforms looking to convert their apps to Windows Phone 7.5 Mango. Basic understanding of C#, XAML and Silverlight is required

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.

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Windows Phone 7 XNA Cookbook

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Zheng Yang ) — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 12:05:22 GMT

Product Description

Complete focus on the best Windows Phone 7 game development techniques using XNA 4.0
Easy to follow cookbook allowing you to dive in wherever you want.
Convert ideas into action using practical recipes

What you will learn from this book

Full 2D sprite animation, texture presentation.
Concise and clear instructions for high performance 3D graphics rendering.
Using accelerometer to control the game object.
Apply the tap, flick, hold and drag gestures on Windows Phone 7 touch screen for different situations.
Understanding the XNA content pipeline for improved game asset processing and management.
A practical guide for collision detection.
Explore the GUI system development.
Add sound and apply the 3D effect to your game.
Render terrain and water on CPU.
Work with game cameras.
Learn key-frame based and skeletal animation techniques.
Hook up your game to Xbox Live.

In Detail

Developing games for Windows Phone 7, a new mobile platform, is your big chance to impact the world of mobile games. The XNA 4.0 for Windows Phone 7 integrates a lot of capabilities from software and hardware for you to create incredible games. The next generation of mobile games will be built by you.

Windows Phone 7 XNA Cookbook is the best choice for you to make a game on Windows Phone 7. The book helps you to master the indispensable techniques to create your games using XNA 4.0. From the basics such as animating a 2D sprite and interacting with the customized graphical user interface to the more challenging such as 3D graphic rendering and collision detection.

This comprehensive cookbook covers all the essential areas of XNA game development for Windows Phone 7, such as approaches to control the sensors, gestures and typical kinds of cameras. We also have recipes for sprite animation, texture rendering, and graphical user interface development that will give you a powerful tool to work with 2D effects. After this we move onto the more juicy stuff with recipes covering 3D graphic rendering and collision detection, and major ways to improve your loading efficiency. You will also work with Xbox live so you can take your game global. Finally, no mobile game development book would be complete without a look at performance optimization to make your games run faster. Windows Phone 7 XNA Cookbook will equip you with the firepower to rock the game world.

Who this book is for

If you are an aspiring programmer with some basic concepts in C# and object-oriented knowledge who wants to create games for Windows Phone 7, this book is for you. This book is also for the experienced programmers want to transfer from Windows or Xbox to the Windows Phone 7 platform. Only basic knowledge of C# and .Net is required.

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MVVM Survival Guide for Enterprise Architectures in Silverlight and WPF: RAW

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Ryan Vice, Muhammad Shujaat Siddiqi ) — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 11:38:19 GMT

Product Description

Build an enterprise application using Silverlight and WPF, taking advantage of the powerful MVVM pattern, with this book and e-book
Discover the evolution of presentation patterns—by example—and see the benefits of MVVM in the context of the larger picture of presentation patterns
Customize the MVVM pattern for your projects’ needs by comparing the various implementation styles

RAW FAQ

This book is currently available as a RAW book. A RAW book is an ebook, and this one is priced at 40% of the usual eBook price. Once you purchase the RAW book, you can immediately download the content of the book so far, and when new chapters become available, you will be notified, and can download the new version of the book. When the book is published, you will receive the full, finished eBook.

If you like, you can preorder the print book at the same time as you purchase the RAW book at a significant discount.

What you will learn from this book

Maximize separation of concerns by taking advantage of WPF and Silverlight’s rich binding system, templates, and commanding infrastructure
Discover the built-in support for MVVM in Entity Framework and WCF
Create unit testable user interfaces the MVVM way
Work in parallel with minimal dependencies by creating blendable architectures
Solve common MVVM problems both with and without frameworks depending on your preference
Extend your architecture and test it by using inversion of control frameworks
Tackle complex designs by using hierarchical view model design and mediators
Reduce the amount of code in your user interface by letting the WPF and Silverlights binding system eliminate your need to do things like casting controls and dispatching
Best practices for dealing with collections
Create designs that allow for dramatically changing your user interface without having to change code outside the view using data templates

In Detail

MVVM (Model View View Model) is a Microsoft best practices pattern for working in WPF and Silverlight that is highly recommended by both Microsoft and industry experts alike. This book will look at the reasons for the pattern still being slow to become an industry standard, addressing the pain points of MVVM. It will help Silverlight and WPF programmers get up and running quickly with this useful pattern.

MVVM Survival Guide for Enterprise Architectures in Silverlight and WPF will help you to choose the best MVVM approach for your project while giving you the tools, techniques, and confidence that you will need to succeed. Implementing MVVM can be a challenge, and this book will walk you through the main issues you will come across when using the pattern in real world enterprise applications.

This book will help you to improve your WPF and Silverlight application design, allowing you to tackle the many challenges in creating presentation architectures for enterprise applications. You will be given examples that show the strengths and weaknesses of each of the major patterns. The book then dives into a full 3 tier enterprise implementation of MVVM and takes you through the various options available and trade-offs for each approach. During your journey you will see how to satisfy all the demands of modern WPF and Silverlight enterprise applications including scalability, testability, extensibility, and blendability.

Complete your transition from ASP.NET and WinForms to Silverlight and WPF by embracing the new tools of these platforms, and the new design style that they allow for. MVVM Survival Guide for Enterprise Architectures in Silverlight and WPF will get you up to speed and ready to take advantage of this powerful new presentation platform.

Who this book is for

This book will be a valuable resource for Silverlight and WPF developers who want to fully maximize the tools with recommended best practices for enterprise development. This is an advanced book and you will need to be familiar with C#, the .Net framework, and Silverlight or WPF.

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Mastering LOB Development for Silverlight 5

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 15:26:41 GMT

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.

What you will learn from this book

Get up and running with coverage of LOB development challenges like building forms, navigation, and service and database access
Get to grips with the MVVM pattern and how to integrate it with RIA Services
Dig deeper by implementing both in Browser and Out of Browser trusted applications
Become fully acquainted with Silverlight and HTML/JavaScript integration
Understand how to add authentication and authorization to your Silverlight application
Gain advanced knowledge of error control topics like error notification to TFS
Become fully equipped with everything an expert developer should know about building Line of Business applications using Silverlight 5
Take advantage of a complete LOB case study built gradually from start to finish throughout each chapter

Approach

This highly practical, expert level tutorial teaches you to build a Line of Business application with the aid of a case study which gradually builds throughout the book. It also includes a jumpstart chapter for developers coming from other technologies.

Who this book is written for

If you already have a firm grasp of Silverlight development and are keen to advance your specialist knowledge of Line of Business (LOB) application development, then Expert Line of Business Application Development for Silverlight 5: Quick Start Guide is for you.

If you are a developer with experience of other technologies, you may also find this book useful.

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Microsoft Silverlight 5 Building Rich Enterprise Dashboards

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:03:02 GMT

Book Description

Create, customize and design rich enterprise dashboards with Microsoft Silverlight 4 with this book and eBook

With this book and e-book, learn how to create, customize and design rich enterprise dashboards with Silverlight
Move from scenarios to requirements by applying user-centered design best practices
Discover the tips, tricks and hands on experience to create, customize and design rich enterprise dashboards with Silverlight from a distinguished team of User Experience and Development authors

In Detail

Microsoft Silverlight is a powerful development platform for creating rich media applications and line of business applications for the web and desktop. Silverlight enables you to create, customize and design rich enterprise dashboards that highlight Key Performance Indicators for your business.

Microsoft Silverlight 4: Building Rich Enterprise Dashboards, is a concise and practical tutorial that shows you how to create, customize and design rich enterprise dashboards with Silverlight.

This book provides real world user experience design topics and starts by providing an overview of the Silverlight Platform and the clear advantages it provides for building dashboards. The book then dives into topics such as Silverlight design and development tools, building a basic Dashboard, Dashboard types and user needs, Designing for Insight, Styling, Building an End to End Dashboard Solution and Data Access Strategies amongst others.

What you will learn from this book

Learn how to create custom user controls, reference resources, and edit basic control templates
Build an end-to-end dashboard solution
Learn how to use Microsoft Expression Blend to style a dashboard
Explore the different types of dashboards, and learn how to choose the most appropriate dashboard type based on your project goals
Discover and represent user needs and scenarios as a basis for dashboard design, using user experience best practices
Understand how to determine between the different data access strategies (SOAP, REST, and OData)
Host and use Silverlight WebParts and the SharePoint Client Object Model

Approach

This book is a concise and practical tutorial that shows you how to create, customize and design rich enterprise dashboards with Silverlight.

Who this book is written for

If you are a .Net developer who wants to create, customize and design rich enterprise dashboards with Silverlight, then this book is for you. You should have an intermediate understanding of .Net development, with a working knowledge of Microsoft Silverlight.

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Pro Business Applications with Silverlight 5

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Chris Anderson ) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:59:06 GMT

Product Description

Silverlight 5 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 on 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 popularity.

This book guides you through the process of designing and developing enterprise-strength business applications in Silverlight 5 and C#. You'll 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. It will introduce the patterns you'll use, the issues you’ll face, and how to resolve them. Author Chris Anderson, who has been building line-of-business applications for years, demonstrates his expertise through a candid presentation of how to tackle real-life issues, rather than just avoiding them. Developers will benefit from his hard-won expertise through business application design patterns that he shares throughout the book.

With this book in hand, you will:

Create a fully-functional business application in Silverlight
Discover how to satisfy the general requirements that most business applications need
Develop a business application framework

What you’ll learn

How to structure your project to ensure a robust and maintainable application
How to create user interfaces with XAML and bind controls to data
How to communicate securely between the server and the client
How to view and maintain data within a Silverlight user interface
How to design unique user experiences and use advanced styling techniques
How to implement standard business application paradigms in Silverlight

Who this book is for
This book is for developers experienced in other .NET technologies, such as WinForms or ASP.NET, looking to translate their existing skills to developing business applications with Silverlight. Patterns and methodologies associated with building robust applications will be introduced and are not prerequisite knowledge.

Abouth the Author

Chris Anderson has been a professional developer for more than 10 years, specializing in building desktop, web, and mobile business applications using Microsoft technologies for industries as wide-ranging as accounting, property valuation, mining, the fresh produce industry, pet cremations, logistics, field services, sales, and construction. Now running his own business, he has turned to Silverlight as the ideal new technology for developing and deploying business applications. Chris currently resides in Sydney, Australia.

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Beginning Silverlight 5 in C#

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Robert Lair ) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:49:02 GMT

Coming soon...

Book Description

The growing popularity of Web 2.0 applications is increasing user expectations for high-quality website design, presentation, and functionality. It is into this climate that Microsoft is releasing Silverlight 5, the latest iteration of its cross-browser web presentation technology.

Beginning Silverlight 5 in C# brings you to the cutting edge of Web 2.0 application design and includes plenty of practical guidance to get you started straight away. Silverlight design tools have important differences compared with those used to create Ajax and JavaScript functionality. Robert Lair takes you on a tour of all the tools, including:

Microsoft Expression Design, which plays an important role in creating Silverlight assets
Microsoft Expression Blend, which is used to build user interaction for Silverlight elements
Microsoft Visual Studio, which manages the interaction between designers and developers, providing the coding environment for “nuts and bolts” wiring

Once you’ve mastered the basics, you'll move on to gain a more in-depth knowledge of some of the features introduced with Silverlight 5, including H.264 protected content, right-click event handling, a new printing API, and support for the Managed Extensibility Framework.What you’ll learn

Discover the tools needed for Silverlight 5 development, the roles each plays, and how they interact to produce a seamless result
Understand the fundamental concepts and techniques that lie at the heart of every successful Silverlight application and how to apply them to your own projects
Explore the new features and coding practices which Silverlight gives you, setting it apart from other web development tools

Who this book is for

This book is for anyone with an interest in web development. A basic familiarity with web development and simple C# coding is useful, but by no means a requirement. This book will teach you everything that you need to know.

About the Author

Robert Lair is the president and chief executive officer of Intensity Software, Inc. and has been working with Microsoft .NET technologies since prior to its initial release in 2000. Among his accomplishments, Robert was on the team that created the original ASP.NET sample application IBuySpy, used to demonstrate the power of ASP.NET. Robert is an active speaker and writer in the development community.

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Silverlight 5 in Action

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Pete Brown ) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:36:50 GMT

Coming soon...

Product Description

Microsoft's Silverlight is the only development platform that combines the performance, security, and flexibility of a desktop application with cross-platform deployment. The latest version, Silverlight 5, offers tons of new features including improved video, audio, and text rendering, enhanced MVVM support, XNA-based 3D and sound APIs, and under-the-hood performance upgrades.

Silverlight 5 in Action is a thorough revision of the bestselling Silverlight 4 in Action. This comprehensive guide teaches Silverlight from the ground up, covering all the new v. 5 features in depth. It also explores WCF RIA Services, MVVM, and more, with dozens of code samples that can be used in Visual Studio 2010 or the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express.

About the author

Pete Brown is a Senior Program Manager with Microsoft, leading the Developer Community team, as well as a former Microsoft Silverlight MVP, INETA speaker, and RIA Architect. Pete's focus at Microsoft is the community around client application development (Windows 8 XAML, WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone, Surface, Windows Forms, C++, Native Windows API, .NET Micro Framework, and more), with a particular focus on XAML.

Pete is the author of the best-selling Silverlight 4 in Action, currently published by Manning Publications, and of Silverlight 5 in Action, and Windows 8 XAML in Action, both currently in development.

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Windows Phone 7.5 Fundamentals: Ebook

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Andrea Boschin ) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:48:34 GMT

This ebook collects all 8 parts of SilverlightShow article series 'Windows Phone 7.5', together with source code.

In these eight chapters Andrea Boschin explores key concepts of Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango), illustrating each of them with examples, and full source code for the demos. You will find a number of options to simplify development tasks on Windows Phone 7.5, as well as add interesting features.

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Microsoft Silverlight 5 Data and Services Cookbook

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Gill Cleeren,Kevin Dockx ) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 15:11:05 GMT

Product Description

Over 115 practical recipes for creating rich, data-driven, business applications in Silverlight 5 using this book and eBook

Design and develop rich data-driven business applications in Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 following best practices using this book and eBook
Rapidly interact with services and handle multiple sources of data within Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 business applications
Understand sophisticated data access techniques in your Silverlight business applications by binding data to Silverlight controls, validating data in Silverlight, getting data from services into Silverlight applications, using data and services using MVVM techniques and much more!.
Packed with practical, hands-on cookbook recipes, illustrating the techniques to solve particular data problems effectively within your Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 business applications

In Detail

Microsoft Silverlight is a programmable web browser plugin that enables features including animation, vector graphics, and audio-video playback - features that characterize Rich Internet Applications. However, Silverlight is a great (and growing) Line-Of-Business platform and is increasingly being used to build data-driven business applications, both in an out of the browser. It is also the heart of Windows Phone 7 development so developers can leverage their knowledge on Microsoft's new mobile platform as well. Services enable efficient access to your data, allowing you to draw on multiple sources of data and solve particular data problems. There is very little existing material that demonstrates how to build data-driven, enterprise-ready solutions with the platform. Silverlight 3 and 4 made a big step into Line-Of-Business data services and Silverlight 5 builds further upon this.

In this book, Gill Cleeren, Microsoft Regional Director, Silverlight MVP (former ASP.NET MVP), Telerik MVP at Ordina Belgium and Kevin Dockx, a technical specialist/project leader on .NET web applications and a solution manager for Rich Applications at RealDolmen, focus on showing .NET developers how to get their finger on the pulse of data-driven business applications in Silverlight and Windows Phone 7. What's more, the upcoming Windows 8 will allow developers to build native, immersive Metro-style applications using XAML & C# - exactly what this book is based upon. In other words, the techniques described in this book also apply to Windows 8.

This book is not a general Silverlight 4/5 overview book; it is uniquely aimed at developers who want to build data-driven applications, based on best practices. It focuses on showing .NET developers how to interact with, and handle multiple sources of data in Silverlight business applications, and how to solve particular data problems following a practical hands-on approach, using real-world recipes. It is a practical cookbook that teaches you how to build data-rich business applications with Silverlight that draw on multiple sources of data. Most of the features covered work both in Silverlight 4 and 5. However, we cover some that are specific to Silverlight 5, which will therefore not work with Silverlight 4. Where this is the case, it is clearly indicated.

Packed with reusable, real-world recipes, the book begins by introducing you to general principles when programming Silverlight. It then dives deep into the world of data and services, covering all the options available to access data and communicate with services to get the most out of data in your Silverlight business applications, whilst at the same time providing a rich user experience. This book also covers topics related to storing data locally as well as explaining how to work with data and services in a Model-View-View-Model (MVVM) architecture. Most of the content is applicable to Windows Phone 7 developers as well; a specific chapter on WP7 development is included in this release. By following the practical recipes in this book, which are of varying difficulty levels, you will learn the concepts needed to create data-rich business applications--from the creation of a Silverlight application, to displaying data in the Silverlight application and applying best practices such as MVVM. Each recipe covers a data services topic, going from the description of the problem, through a conceptual solution to a solution containing sample code.

What you will learn from this book

Build and maintain data-driven applications easily using the data binding engine, which does most of the work for you
See how validation can be applied effectively to ensure correct input within your applications
Use Isolated Storage classes to store data locally, possibly even between sessions, instead of accessing your services for each data need, bringing down the load on your serve
Learn all about the Model-View-View-Model (MVVM) pattern and how you can access data and services from an MVVM architecture
Access all kinds of services, including WCF, ASMX, REST, RSS, sockets and more from your Silverlight applications, even if hosted in Windows Azure
Get a deep knowledge about WCF RIA Services and how you can build your architecture around them
Build data-driven Windows Phone 7 applications and leverage your knowledge in the mobile platform
Throughout the book, you'll learn to use XAML & C# to build your LOB applications - skills that can be reused for Windows 8 development

Approach

Written in a cookbook style, this book offers learning and techniques through recipes. It contains step-by-step instructions for developers who want to build rich data-driven business applications using Silverlight or Windows Phone 7. The book is designed in such a way that you can refer to things chapter by chapter, or read them in no particular order.

Who this book is written for

If you are a .NET developer who wants to build professional data-driven applications with Silverlight or Windows Phone 7, then this book is for you. Basic experience of programming Silverlight and familiarity with accessing data using ADO.NET in normal .NET applications is required.

About the Author

Gill Cleeren

Gill Cleeren is Microsoft Regional Director (theregion.com), Silverlight MVP (former ASP.NET MVP) and Telerik MVP. He lives in Belgium where he works as .NET architect at Ordina (ordina.be/). Passionate about .NET, he's always playing with the newest bits. In his role as Regional Director, Gill has given many sessions, webcasts and training on new as well as existing technologies, such as Silverlight, ASP.NET and WPF at conferences including TechEd Berlin 2010, TechDays Belgium - Switzerland - Sweden, DevDays NL, NDC Oslo Norway, DevReach Bulgaria, NRW Conference Germany, Spring Conference UK, Telerik Silverlight Roadshow in Sweden, Telerik RoadShow UK. He is the author of Packt's Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook and is also the author of many articles in various developer magazines and for SilverlightShow.net and he organizes the yearly Community Day event in Belgium. He also leads Visug (visug.be), the largest .NET user group in Belgium. You can find his blog at snowball.be and on Twitter by following gillcleeren

Kevin Dockx

Kevin Dockx lives in Belgium and works at RealDolmen, one of Belgium's biggest ICT companies, where he is a 30-year old technical specialist/project leader on .NET web applications, mainly Silverlight, and a solution manager for Rich Applications (Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, WPF, Surface, HTML5). His main focus is on all things Silverlight, but he still keeps an eye on the new developments concerning other products from the Microsoft .NET (Web) Stack. As a Silverlight enthusiast, he's a regular speaker on various national and international events, like Microsoft DevDays in the Netherlands, Microsoft Techdays in Portugal, NDC Oslo Norway, and Community Day Belgium. He is the author of Packt's Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook and also writes articles for various Silverlight-related sites & magazines. His blog, which contains various tidbits on Silverlight, .NET, and the occasional rambling, can be found at blog.kevindockx.com/, and you can find him on Twitter as well: KevinDockx.

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OData & Cloud Augmentation of Windows Phone Apps: Ebook

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Samidip Basu ) — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 15:48:02 GMT

Product Description

This e-book collects all 3 parts of SilverlightShow article series on using OData and Azure in Windows Phone, together with source code.

From the author:

Windows Azure & Windows Phone seem to be two very popular technologies out of Redmond right now.

There is obviously a lot of buzz around cloud infrastructure involving Azure solutions and the wonderful developer story that we have for Windows Phone development. But, should these two platforms work together & if so, can they? How can you as a Mobile/Windows Phone developer utilize the cloud?

In the first chapter, we talk about how to leverage Windows Azure to supplement our Windows Phone application. In particular, we will see how SQL Azure can be rather beneficial in providing globally accessible & scalable backend for mobile solutions on Windows Phone & other disparate platforms. The key link we shall leverage is OData Services for providing cross-platform read/write access to a central data repository...

About the author:

Samidip Basu (@samidip ) is a technologist & gadget-lover working as a Manager & Solutions Lead for Sogeti out of the Columbus OH Unit. Having worked on WP7 since CTP days, he now spends much of his time in spreading the word to discover the full potential of the Windows Phone platform & cloud-based mobile solutions in general. He passionately runs the Central Ohio Windows Phone User Group (http://cowpug.org/) and can be found with atleast a couple of hobbyist projects at any time. His spare times call for travel and culinary adventures with the wife. Find out more at http://samidipbasu.com/

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Silverlight and Sharepoint Working Together: Ebook

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Walter Ferrari ) — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 15:33:16 GMT

Product Description

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

Contents of the ebook so far:

Chapter 1
Two new convenient item templates for Visual Studio: the Silverlight Sharepoint Web Parts
The Silverlight Web Part
Silverlight Web Part deployment process
Using the “Silverlight Web Part”
Silverlight Web Part and Silverlight Client Object Model
Summary

Chapter 2
The Silverlight Custom Web Part
What is a Sandboxed Visual Web Part
Functioning of the Silverlight Custom Web Part
Summary

Chapter 3
The built-in navigation system of Sharepoint
A Silverlight menu for Sharepoint
The “client approach”
Pitfalls of the client approach
The “server approach”
Summary

About the Author:

Walter Ferrari is an environmental engineer and cultivates his passion for software development for a long time. He is currently a consultant working for his company, Abertech. He develops applications based on Microsoft technologies since 1995 and works primarily with .NET since 2003. He is currently focused on Silverlight and Sharepoint and acts as representative of CompletIT/SilverlightShow. Walter is the author of many appreciated SilverlightShow articles - check all of them here.

Walter is used to wearing a helmet while writing code..just to avoid serious damages when slamming his head against the monitor :) He blogs about his passion at http://www.snello.it/eng

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Fun with Silverlight 4

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Rajesh Lal ) — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 15:03:52 GMT

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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Authorization in Silverlight: Ebook

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Kevin Dockx ) — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 18:18:42 GMT

Product Description

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.

Table of Contents:

Chapter 1: Authorized navigation
    Introduction
    Introducing: the Custom Content Loader
    The required parts
    Uri right mappings: who can access which resource?
    The Authentication context
    Our own custom content loader
    Bringing it all together…
    Conclusion

Chapter 2: Manipulating the UI
    Introduction
    The not-so-cool yet oh-well-it-works way
    Introducing a better approach: attachable properties.
    The Authorization Service
    Helper method: setting the target properties.
    Using this in XAML
    Conclusion

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Developing Real-world Applications with LightSwitch: E-book

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Gill Cleeren ) — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 17:58:29 GMT

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.

More specifically, I plan the following topics to be tackled along the way:

What is LightSwitch and where I see it being useful
The concepts of a LightSwitch application
Data in more detail
Screens in more detail
Queries in more detail
Writing business logic and validation
Managing security in a LightSwitch application
Deploying a LightSwitch application
Extensions - what and how
Using custom Silverlight controls in LightSwitch
Adapting the LightSwitch UI to your needs
Using RIA Services

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Getting Ready for the Windows Phone 7 Exam 70-599: E-book

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Peter Kuhn ) — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 14:45:27 GMT

Product Description

Microsoft's certification exam 70-599 for its new mobile platform is named "Designing and Developing Windows Phone 7 Applications" and has been published on July 14th, 2011. This ebook will try to bring you up to speed to take the exam, or can be used as a basis to plan your own, self-paced learning to prepare for the exam at a later point.

The ebook is based on SilverlightShow's 5-part article series ‘Getting ready for the Windows Phone 7 Exam 70-599'authored by Peter Kuhn. While the online article series gives references to external resources, here we have done our best to include those resources as full text, so you may enjoy the ebook while travelling, at places with no connection, on your desktop, etc. For each topic the author Peter Kuhn has picked the resource that best covers the material needed. Of 36 total selected resources, 33 have been published as full text, and the rest of the resources are still included as links due to lack of copy permissions or inability to reach the respective authors.

From the author:

Unlike with Silverlight for the desktop which had no exam available until version 4, Microsoft pushed out a beta version of the exam for Windows Phone 7 only a few months after the devices hit the market. The publish date for the final version of that exam in July means we'll see the first certification option for developers in a lot less than a year of presence in the market. This once again demonstrates the importance of the platform to Microsoft, and is the attempt to establish a standard to attest a developer's knowledge level early on. For you as a developer this opens the opportunity to demonstrate your expertise by an official certificate and be recognized by potential employers or clients as someone who has internalized and mastered the essential concepts of the platform successfully.

The structure of this ebook is based on the measured skills outline available from Microsoft to make it easy to follow along and map what you learn to the requirements of the exam. That outline, along with additional information about the exam, can be found online here: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exam.aspx?ID=70-599#tab2. The individual parts are:

Designing Data Access Strategies (19%)
Designing and Implementing Notification Strategies (17%)
Working with Platform APIs, Tasks, and Choosers (21%)
Designing the Application Architecture (21%)
Designing the User Interface and User Experience (22%)

We hope you will enjoy this e-book, and wish you good luck with taking the exam!

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