About the Book
Over 80 practical recipes for creating rich, data-driven business applications in Silverlight
Key Features
Design and develop rich data-driven business applications in Silverlight
Rapidly interact with and handle multiple sources of data and services within Silverlight 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 and much more!
Packed with practical, hands-on cookbook recipes, illustrating the techniques to solve particular data problems effectively within your Silverlight business applications
Book DescriptionMicrosoft 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. Silverlight Data 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 solutions with the platform. Silverlight 3 made a big step into Line-Of-Business data services and Silverlight 4 builds further upon this. This book will enable .NET developers to get their finger on the pulse of data-driven business applications in Silverlight.This book is not a general Silverlight 3/4 overview book; it is uniquely aimed at developers who want to build data-driven applications. 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 covered features work both in Silverlight 3 and 4. However, we cover some that are specific for Silverlight 4, which will therefore not work with Silverlight 3. 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 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. Chapters cover data binding, data controls, the concepts of talking to services, communicating with WCF, ASMX and REST services, and much more.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 upgrading your existing applications to use Silverlight. 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
Display and validate data efficiently in Silverlight business applications
Build data-driven business applications in Silverlight much more easily and much faster using Data binding
Know when and how to customize your data using important data controls within Silverlight
Discover how your Silverlight business applications can quickly access data residing in a database by calling web services such as RSS, JSON, Windows Azure, and more
Exchange information between Silverlight clients and WCF or ASMX services in your Silverlight business applications
Add functionality to your Silverlight business applications by harnessing REST and WCF Data Services as an underlying platform for communication via Flickr and Twitter
Simplify your data-driven business application development with WCF RIA Services
Leverage your existing knowledge, applications, and business requirements of Silverlight by Integrating Silverlight into existing business applications
Who this book is forIf you are a .NET developer who wants to build professional data-driven applications with Sliverlight, 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.
Table of Contents:
Table of Contents
About the Author :
Gill Cleeren is Microsoft Regional Director (http://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, hes 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 Packts 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 (http://www.visug.be), the largest .NET user group in Belgium. You can find his blog at http://www.snowball.be and on Twitter by following @gillcleeren. 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 Packts 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 http://blog.kevindockx.com/, and you can find him on Twitter as well: @KevinDockx.
