Customer Reviews

Data-Driven Services with Silverlight 2

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

While many initial books on Silverlight tended to highlight the ease with which one can create great looking animations and user interfaces, this book is focused entirely on tools and techniques for building and debugging data-bound applications with Silverlight 2 as the client. The first four chapters discuss in great detail various data binding concepts and how Silverlight 2's offerings are more limited than those available with WPF. Chapters 5 and 6 are devoted to discussions of building and consuming ASMX and SOAP-based WCF services, cross-domain policies, and new data serialization features available in .Net 3.5 SP 1; one key learning from these chapters is that Silverlight 2 only supports basicHttpBinding for SOAP-based WCF Services. The next three chapters explain how REST-based Services differ from SOAP-based Services, how to build REST-based WCF Services, and how to consume such services as well as RESTful Services available from Digg, Amazon, and Twitter using the WebClient class (a scaled down version of the full .Net version) included in the Silverlight 2 plug-in. Those chapters demonstrate how to issue GET and POST RESTful requests but only briefly describe the availability of workarounds for issuing PUT and DELETE Restful requests with no further pointers or sample code. The same chapters include demonstrations of how to consume responses formatted in XML or JSON using LINQ to XML and LINQ to JSON, respectively. The next chapter provides information on how to interact with Syndication Feeds, and the last chapter is a lengthy excellent discussion of how to use ADO.Net Data Services. Appendix A provides a Quick Reference on ADO.Net Data Services and Appendix B discusses a few HTTP Sniffing Tools that can be used for debugging Silverlight 2 applications. All code samples are in C# and VB, and can be downloaded from silverlight-data.com. Overall, I thought the book is very well-written, the code samples are easy to follow, but almost all of them only deal with happy path scenarios, with very little discussion of potential gotchas and how to deal with such potential problems.

This book comprehensivley covers all of the important topics required for constructing SilverLight apps that are interacting with different data sources through WCF or REST. It provides very detailed information on the different techniques available. It includes a great chapter on using ADO.Net Data Services, including how to use the Entity Framework. Most developers will pick one particular data integration architecture and stick with it, this book will certainly help architects to make the correct decision and answer their questions regarding the different alternatives. A valuable resource.

My favorite parts of this book include data binding and ado.net
data services. I did wish that john covered asp.net ajax a bit deeper
and went into sql custom domain modeling. John papa writes for msdn
magazine and his books and articles are a pleasure to read....

I've just started to dig my way into Silverlight 2 and this book has been invaluable in getting me up to speed on the technology. If you don't know anything about WPF or XAML, you may want to get a primer book to accompany this, but once you're up to speed on the basics, this book will take you to the next step of getting your Silverlight applications talking to a variety of services in a variety of ways. For me, the chapters on using REST services and ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) were invaluable in getting my application going. If you want to learn how to effectively use Silverlight in a data-based application, you'll definitely find some useful information here.

I give the book 5 stars for the topics covered overall, but only 3 stars for repeating things over and over. If it were not to the source code excerpts, the book would be closer to a transcript of an SL class than to a commercial book.

To get an idea of how annoying things are at times, consider the following two sentences from the first paragraph in page 150:

"The ADO.NET EF is a far more powerful tool than LINQ to SQL, and it can easily create a domain entity model that is mapped to a database. The EF can easily create a domain entity model that is mapped to a database."

Other examples of repetitiveness include descriptions of cross-domain restrictions, binding modes, etc...

As one who interacts with Silverlight beginners and experts on a daily basis, I will tell you that the #1 questions are always with regard to accessing information (data) from Silverlight. This book covers all the basics and the advanced for anyone to really understand. Providing samples in both C# and Visual Basic, John does a great job providing the information you need to be successful.

This should be required reading/reference for ANY Silverlight developer.

The book may be the best available at this time and I appreciate it exists already. But I could have waited another week or two to have it cleaned up. It looks like the author never took the time to plan where he would introduce concepts and hence ended up introducing them repeatedly. Or do authors get paid by the page? For instance, the concept that a DataContext for a control can be specified at every level in the control hierarchy above (and including) this control is mentioned SIX times (pages 27, 28, 36 (twice), 37, and 38). Explaining INotifyPropertyChanged and Binding Modes is important, but does it really need 21 pages to cover them? Do we really need an example with 10 properties (both in C# and VB) to get it? Couldn't the XAML (page 51) at least be clean? On page 101 he writes (no kidding!)

"This window will search for any service that exposes Web Services Description Language (WSDL), which makes it discoverable. Both WCF web services and ASMX web services support SOAP 1.1 and are discoverable, so you can find them through this window. You can add as a service reference from a Silverlight 2 application any SOAP service that is discoverable and supports the basic profile of SOAP 1.1. Discoverable services are those that support WSDL. These include both WCF services and ASMX services"

John Papa's articles in MSDN Magazine are of much higher quality.
So I definitely do not agree with others who claim this book is very well written. When I read the same thing over and over again I feel I am listening to a poorly prepared presentation, taking too much of my time. Hopefully next time the editors (are allowed to) play their role. The subject deserves it.

Good book, a bit slow at times (author reiterates points a little too often - thus the 4 stars), but other wise good material. This information on Silverlight is currently not compiled into any one location right now. If you're looking for nuts and bolts info on how Silverlight talks to servers, this is your best option. Unfortunately, there is not any info on how Silverlight uses sockets, which I feel belongs in this book.

Finished the book! I highly recommend this book to anyone doing (or wanting to do) LOB apps involving Silverlight 2. Ch. 5/6's treatment of SOAP apps w/ASMX&WCF was well-written. Ch. 7-9 examples - digg, Amazon, and twitter - gave good coverage of RESTful services. I skimmed over Ch. 10 - RSS/Atom - because I wanted to focus on Ch. 11 - ADO.NET Data Services and Entity Framework. I was certainly not disappointed. Overall, this is a great book! Examples of how LINQ to SQL/XML/JSON works + WCF/REST are worth the book's price.

Developers and businesses alike are starting to see the benefits of Silverlight 2 and more and more are starting to take advantage of it's capabilities. Most web-developers have a good knowledge of Microsoft's .Net platform, they also have good knowledge of HTML, CSS and all the other technologies surrounding the web. However presentation fairly much still is lacking on the web front, even with the acceptance of AJAX, it's still like an amateurs representation of the Mona Lisa compared with the desktop cousins. The first version of Silverlight was mainly geared towards video and audio and was restricted to the Javascript language. With the introduction of Silverlight 2, you now have pre-built controls at your disposal, C# and VB.Net programming access and a whole lot more. The painting has now gone from being amateurish to professional but still not quite the original. Now however developers can re-use their existing .Net Framework knowledge without having to learn another language like Flash and have a rich user experience. One thing that you will definitely need is data. Data is king in any application and gaining access to your data is what this book is all about.

Silverlight 2 introduced various ways in which you can gain access to your data, through RESTful web services, SOAP, RSS, AtomPub, POX, JSON, direct from a backend database etc. etc. You can write your own data layers or bind directly to controls and can even use LINQ.

John Papa takes you by the hand and shows you how to do all of the above scenarios and more. The book is very well written, easy to read and understand and no filler (something I'm really disliking about certain books, putting filler in just to increase page count).

There are whole chapters dedicated to each of the main ways to gain access to your data and bind it to your front end application with numerous examples throughout including how to read Tweets, access and consume Amazon RESTful services, the ADO.Net Entity Framework etc. If there is a way to access data you will find out how to incorporate that into your Silverlight 2 application with this book. And of course, you can also take the techniques John has so masterfully expounded on in this book and use them in your standard ASP.Net web sites as well.

If you're a Silverlight developer, this is one of those must have books. You'll refer to it over and over. Even if you're a standard ASP.Net developer it is worth taking a look through this book as most of the content can very easily be applied to a normal ASP.Net site.