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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

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.

Several months ago the guys from Microsoft announced that they are developing a framework for developing Business applications under Silverlight with the codename Alexandria and now it's a reality! On the MIX'09 session a release of it under the name .NET RIA Services was announced.  The possibilities that the framework are really great and allow the Silverlight developers to easily develop business application in a much easier and faster way.

I am starting this series of articles in order to introduce the main features of the .NET RIA Services framework.

Introduction

In this article I will present the Silverlight application I was busy with recently - the Silverlight Metronome. It's a classical metronome (a measurement tool for tempo, mostly used by musicians) that is based on a pendulum with a moveable mass, which modifies its period. The project was very challenging as it needed some simple physics and a beautiful design to be implemented. In my opinion I have accomplished it or at least I have done it according to the physics; the design has always been a very subjective topic. Anyway, you can see the live demo here and download the source code here, but I'm sure that you would like from us to make a fast dissection of the application and see how it works.

With the Windows Presentation Foundation a new type of events were introduced - the RoutedEvents. They have provided the developer with entirely new approach to the eventing and the event handling. Those of you who are already at the WPF and have experience with the routing of events may found this article useless, but I believe that it can be a good starting point for everyone who makes his first steps in the event routing and more specially in the Silverlight event routing.

Since the first beta release of Silverlight 2 there was a lot of talk about controls such as TreeView, auto complete TextBox, WrapPanel, DockPanel etc, and because of the high demand some custom controls were created. Two weeks ago the Silverlight Toolkit was released and introduced the so long awaited controls. In this article we'll take a closer look at one of them - the TreeView.

Introduction

I believe that most of you are already familiar with the controls of this type either from their web or desktop experience with technologies such as WPF, WinForms or ASP.NET. But for those who are going to be introduced to this type of controls I'll give a short description: The TreeView is a control with tree structure which main purpose is to display hierarchical data in the form of nodes. Each node that has children can be collapsed and expanded.

In the article about the basic customizations of the DataGrid control we showed how to change the color of the rows and of the alternating rows, how to modify the headers' and the gridlines' visibility. But we haven't mentioned anything about how to change the look of the row when the mouse is over it or when it's selected. Let's take a look how we can achieve that.

Before starting

I won't start directly with the explanation of each thing and step we have to do. Instead I’ll start with a few common things. First there is no specific property for the color of the selected row, as RowBackground and AlternatingRowBackground and the only property that comes in hand is the RowStyle. The Target property of the style must be set to DataGridRow and the thing we have to customize is the Template property. I've tried to do this using the Expression Blend, but I didn’t find a way to get to this Template, so I had to disassemble the System.Windows.Controls.Data.dll and get the template from there. After that I modified what I needed in the VisualStudio.