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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 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

In Part 5 of this series I looked into creating a form to maintain the details of products in the inventory. In this article I will look at implementing reporting functionality within the Silverlight application.

Source Code and Live Demo*

Instructions on setting up the sample project can be found in Part 1.

*To log into the sample application use the following Username: demo and Password: demo

Reporting Requirements

Businesses need to be able to store their data, but they also want to get information out of the system to track and monitor various aspects of the business such as performance, cash flow, forecasts, sales vs targets, etc.

Introduction

In Part 4 of this series I looked into creating a simple business object framework to manage our business objects, implementing the Product business object with some validation rules, creating some dictionaries (collection of items to populate our drop down lists), and implementing the CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) functions in the WCF service.

The scenario that we will target in this article is a continuation of the inventory management within the AdventureWorks company, in particular maintaining the product list.

Introduction

In Part 3 of this series I looked into the methods of communicating with the WCF service on the server. The focus of this article is to create a business object framework to manage our business objects. Changes to business objects need to be validated against a set of business rules to ensure the integrity of the data within the database, and invalid data needs to be clearly pointed out to the user so they can resolve any issue. After building this framework we will create a Product business object that contains the primary data for a product and define a number of rules to validate this product. This article isn’t really Silverlight specific but could apply to various client types when implementing a line of business application. However it is a very important step in building a line of business application, and since it’s a line of business application we’re building I decided to devote an article to it. I will return to more Silverlight specific topics in the next article in this series.

Source Code and Live Demo*

Instructions on setting up the sample project can be found in Part 1.

*To login in the sample application use the following Username: demo and Password: demo.

Introduction

In Part 2 of this series I completed implementing the inventory list screen. The focus of this article is to describe the process of transferring data between the server (a WCF service) and the client (the Silverlight application), securely and sharing common business logic where possible.

Source Code* and Live Demo**

*To run the source code take a look at the "Using the sample application" section of the previous article first.

**To login in the sample application use the following Username: demo and Password: demo.

Introduction

In Part 1 of this series I covered developing the framework for a Line-Of-Business application in Silverlight, including the user interface framework, communication with a WCF service, a login screen, and a basic inventory list. In this article I will take you through the steps to extend the functionality of the inventory list to page, sort and group the results.

Source code* and Live Demo**

*To run the source code take a look at the "Using the sample application" section of the previous article first.

**To login in the sample application use the following Username: demo and Password: demo.

Limitations of the Standard DataGrid Control

It never ceases to amaze me how Microsoft repeatedly releases grid controls that don’t provide the ability to group similar rows together under a heading (such as the ASP.NET GridView control, the DataGrid and DataGridView Windows Forms controls, and until recently WPF didn’t even have a data grid in the SDK!).

Hi Silverlighters,

We are proud to announce that Chris Anderson has joined the team of authors writing for SilverlightShow.net. This means that you are going to see articles written by him more often. For those of you who do not know who Chris is, we will just mention that he won the second place award in the Silverlight Write & Contest with the amazing article Building a Framework for Silverlight Line-Of-Business Applications.

In the next weeks he will stick to the following schedule to extend his LOB application:

Part 1: Building a Framework for Silverlight Line-Of-Business Applications - published;
Part 2: Implementing the complete product list screen - including paging, sorting, and searching the list.  Using dynamic lambda expressions to query the Entity Framework - published;
Part 3: Implementing secure web services.  Structuring projects to share business logic between the client and the server.  Discussion of ADO.NET data services and cslalight - published;
Part 4: Creating the needed business objects - published;
Part 5: Creating a form to view and edit the details of a product.  Topics include generating the form, implementing validation rules, implementing drop down lists and caching the data for these in isolated storage - published;
Part 6: Implementing reporting (including HTML DOM interoperability) - published; 
    Part 7.1: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Styling Part 7.1 - published;
    Part 7.2: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Silverlight Styling Concepts 7.2 - published;
    Part 7.3: Design Tools and Usage Hints;
    Part 7.4: Restyling The Framework;
    Part 7.5: Restyling The Login and Summary List pages;
    Part 7.6: Restyling The Product Details pages (including coverage of the ImplicitStyleManager control.

Chris, thank you once again for doing this and good luck with the articles, we know you will do it perfectly!

Sincerely Yours
SilverlightShow Team

Note: This article is submitted by Chris Anderson for Silverlight: Write and Win contest. Thanks a lot, Chris! Hello All, Please drop a comment if you like it.

“It is time to vote now! Please, choose your favorite articles and enter your vote by going to contest page. Thank you!„

Introduction

Silverlight is one of the major new technologies from Microsoft near release and will potentially have a huge impact on the Microsoft development community. Developers are rapidly looking to Silverlight to solve major challenges and limitations as posed by existing technologies (such as Windows Forms and ASP.NET). WPF uptake has been lukewarm at best, however the similarities it has with Silverlight could very well give it the kick it needs. Silverlight, after starting it's life with the code name of WPF/E (WPF Everywhere) has been some time in the making but the version we've all been waiting for (version 2, containing a subset of the .NET Framework allowing developers to write client side code in their favourite .NET language rather than just Javascript which was the only option in version 1 of Silverlight) is finally nearing completion.