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This article is Part 1 of the series WCF RIA Services:

1. Getting Started with WCF RIA Services 
2. Querying Data Through WCF RIA Services
3. Updating Data Through WCF RIA Services
4. WCF RIA Services and MVVM
5. Metadata Classes and Shared Code in WCF RIA Services
6. Validating Data with WCF RIA Services
7. Authenticating and Authorizing Calls in WCF RIA Services
8. Debugging and Testing WCF RIA Services Applications
9. Structuring WCF RIA Services Applications
10. Exposing Additional Domain Service Endpoints for Other Clients

Introduction

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.

In the previous part of this article I introduced a custom Form control I made for some real world projects. I've briefly explained the reasons why I choose to not use the Silverlight Toolkit's DataForm, just before to show how to build this control, and I've also detailed what I like of the DataForm and what I should retain in my Form control.  One of this features is the validation of the input and it is what I'm about to describe in the second part.

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The databinding in Silverlight directly supports the validation through a couple of attributes, that let the developer specify if the markup extension has to notify validation exceptions to the control binded to a property so it can show the errors to the user.

Introduction

Let’s imagine a scenario in which you have a series of Excel files (.xlsx) on your computer but you don’t have any Microsoft Office installed. What can we do if we want to examine the content of these files?
In this article we will describe a small Silverlight application allowing you to open and view these files and also create line series graphs. I used this exercise as laboratory to familiarize myself with some of the new features of Silverlight 4 like, for instance, drag&drop of files from local folders to the application, drag&drop between controls in the application, right click event handling, theming and so on.

Working with DataForm I found difficult to use it in many scenarios due to its design. So I've created a control where I do not generate fields but I handle automatic validation and cancel/commit commands enabling also the usage of the control in mvvm scenarios. This is a good starting point to understand about Validation, BindingExpressions and traversing the visual tree.

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The first time I've met the DataForm control - it was some days after its beta release in the Silverlight Toolkit - I was really astounded from its power. It is capable of many wonders: it generates fields detecting the properties of the binded item, it automatically validates the input values using a bunch of attributes in a way similar to ASP.NET Dynamic Data, it manages the workflow passing through Edit, ReadOnly and Insert state, and these are only a small subset of the features it exposes.

Read part 2 of this article series called: A simplified DataForm replacement - Part 2 Adding validation support

Introduction

One of the main concepts, when you work over a complex (or not so) project, is “divide and conquer”. This is the need of splitting the whole project into small and reusable parts, called controls. Having lots of these smaller parts, you can easily manage them in a view (page, window, etc).

People who have worked with WinForms and ASP.NET are already familiar with this idea. It is realized both in WPF and Silverlight as well. Each control has its own behavior and style. The look and feel of each control can be tweaked through styles or can be entirely redesigned through templates, and the behavior of controls can be modified through event handlers.

This took about 4 months of part-time work but I finally got the Silverlight Bridge File Manager working enough so I can release it. This is actually just a small part of a larger project that is Silverlight Bridge. Silverlight Bridge will eventually allow you to see the files on your local computer and drag and drop the files from your local computer to the folders on the server.

Silverlight Bridge is a project that Ian started when he decided that you should be able to see your local hard drive in a Silverlight application.

The official release of Silverlight 3 is already a fact and at Silverlight.net you can find the latest files for download. For more information on how to get started with the new Silverlight 3, pay a visit to our Get Started page.

With the official release there are a lot of changes that will affect in some way the Silverlight 2 and Silverlight 3 Beta applications. As the list of changes is pretty long, I will overview only the most interesting of them, but to be fully intact with the new release and to convert your application as fast and easy as possible, be sure to read this breaking changes document, provided by the Silverlight SDK team.

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

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.