Microsoft Silverlight 5 Building Rich Enterprise Dashboards [Paperback]

Snyder Todd (Author), Matthew Duffield (Author), Jeffrey Smith (Author), Joel Eden (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 27, 2012

Create, customize and design rich enterprise dashboards with Microsoft Silverlight 5 book and eBook

Overview

• With this book and e-book, learn how to create, customize and design rich enterprise dashboards with Silverlight

• Move from scenarios to requirements by applying user-centered design best practices

• Discover the tips, tricks and hands on experience to create, customize and design

rich enterprise dashboards with Silverlight from a distinguished team of User Experience and Development authors

In Detail

Microsoft Silverlight is a powerful development platform for creating rich media applications and line of business applications for the web and desktop. Silverlight enables you to create, customize and design rich enterprise dashboards that highlight Key Performance Indicators for your business.

Microsoft Silverlight 5: Building Rich Enterprise Dashboards is a concise and practical tutorial that shows you how to create, customize and design rich enterprise dashboards with Silverlight.

This book provides real world user experience design topics and starts by providing an overview of the Silverlight Platform and the clear advantages it provides for building dashboards. The book then dives into topics such as Silverlight design and development tools, building a basic Dashboard, Dashboard types and user needs, Designing for Insight, Styling, Building an End to End Dashboard Solution and Data Access Strategies amongst others.

What you will learn from this book

• Learn how to create custom user controls, reference resources, and edit basic control templates

• Build an end-to-end dashboard solution

• Learn how to use Microsoft Expression Blend to style a dashboard

• Explore the different types of dashboards, and learn how to choose the most appropriate dashboard type based on your project goals

• Discover and represent user needs and scenarios as a basis for dashboard design, using user experience best practices

• Understand how to determine between the different data access strategies (SOAP, REST, and OData)

• Host and use Silverlight WebParts and the SharePoint Client Object Model

Approach

This book is a concise and practical tutorial that shows you how to create, customize and design rich enterprise dashboards with Silverlight.

Who this book is for

If you are a .Net developer who wants to create, customize and design rich enterprise dashboards with Silverlight, then this book is for you. You should have an intermediate understanding of .Net development, with a working knowledge of Microsoft Silverlight.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Todd Snyder

Todd Snyder has been a software developer/architect for over 16 years. During that time, he has spent several years as a consultant providing technical guidance and leadership for the development of enterprise class systems on the Microsoft Platform. At Infragistics, he is a principal consultant that focuses on the design and construction of RIA and n-tier based applications. Todd is the co-leader for the New Jersey .Net user group (njdotnet.net) and is a frequent speaker at trade shows, code camps, and Firestarters.

Joel Eden

Joel Eden has been working in the area of user experience and design methods for over 10 years. Currently a Senior Interaction Designer working on UX Tools at Infragistics, Joel spent three years in the Infragistics Services group, consulting for external clients. Prior to Infragistics, he worked at multiple design agencies in the Philadelphia area, as well as working at Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Labs. Joel holds a B.S. in Computer Science, and a Ph.D in Information Science, both from Drexel University.

Jeffrey Smith

Jeffrey Smith has been a Visual Designer for six years. During that time he has been an Art Director at various agencies and studied special effects and animation at NYU. A convert from flash and flex he has been working with .NET technologies for the past two years, specializing in WPF and Silverlight. At Infragistics, he is an UX Visual Designer that focuses on the design, implementation and User Experience. You can view some of his work at thinksinkstudio.com.

Matthew Duffield

Matthew Duffield is a .NET architect designing and developing enterprise applications. He specializes in .NET with an emphasis on WPF, Silverlight, and WP7 development. He is a Microsoft MVP in Client Application Development and has an MSCD.NET certification. He also works in business intelligence, designing and developing solutions for data warehouse and data mining initiatives. You can read his blog at mattduffield.wordpress.com and follow him on Twitter at mattduffield.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (January 27, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1849682348
• ISBN-13: 978-1849682343
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 0.6 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,373,826 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Buy this book before you start developing March 1, 2012

By jasedwards

Format:Paperback

If you are tasked with developing a dashboard solution do yourself and your company's budget a favor and read this book first. Two years ago I was told to develop a dashboarding solution for my company's application. After trying out some 3rd party tools I decided it would be better to develop one from scratch. I did what most people would do; I worried about how to get the data and then just threw them in charts that my higher ups thought looked "pretty". The dashboard solution was complete and I thought it went pretty well. After reading this book I realized that just about every mistake you can make, I made.

The great thing about this book is that it not only covers technical aspects or building a rich enterprise dashboard solution but also covers in great detail the theory of putting a dashboard solution together. From what chart types to use in certain situations, to the proper way to layout the different parts and finally how to put yourself in the shoes of the user to gain a better understanding of what would be helpful to them. A must read for not only developers but also business analysts and anybody else involved in the design.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Saved me hours of searching for answers April 12, 2012

By Daniel R. Gleason

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book came along at the most perfect time. SL 5 had just been released, my company had been requesting web based Dashboards, and I had just looked at Visifire for charting.

I had gotten some ideas from Matt Duffield's fantastic blog ([...]) and saw he was advertising his new book there, and I bought a hard copy edition as well as getting the Kindle version. I gave the HC version to my Dev partner and I read the kindle version over a two week period as we were building the dashboards at the same time.

This book touched on just about every aspect of Dev issues we were running into. WCF RAI services were new to us, and we had not built any SL apps yet so we were starting from ground zero.
In just a couple hundred pages, I was able to find explanations to the WCF/RIA MVVM concept that I was trying to wrap my head around, and we were able to get a prototype up and running in 5 days of programming and testing. After we got the book, we stopped searching the Internet looking for answers and just opened the book to the topic we were stuck on and we found enough detail to help us out of each rut we encountered.

The last point I want to touch on is Expression Blend. I had not used it at all, even though I downloaded every version as MS would release them thinking "someday"...But when we were in the SL app there were several treatments I wanted to do, that I was having tough time in VS trying to make happen in XAML so I opened up the book to the Expression Blend section and I went through the examples presented and I was able to learn how to make a copy of a template, make my changes, and assign it to a resource. In a couple hours, I finally felt like I had a decent understanding on how to do the little tweaks to buttons and resources that I wanted to, and jumping back to VS was a no brainer. I would have to say, that section on Blend, saved me days by itself.

I HIGHLY recommend this book for anyone getting started in SL and RIA Services as I was. It is a quick and easy read, and if you have some programming background, you can understand the sample code without having to type it out. It is not cluttered, overly detailed example code as some books get caught up in doing. The code examples focus on the topic they are trying to demonstrate and it is carried out very well. Great Job on putting this book together and keeping it slim, and tight with content.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Great book for a narrow audience April 15, 2012

By aquaseal

Format:Paperback

If you are into Silverlight and interested in building a dashboard of any sort I would recommend this book. The authors present great information on dashboards and how to construct them from the ground up using Silverlight and associated technologies to connect the dots. However, with all of the technology topics covered in this book there is not enough information to really understand what is going on. At a high level everything is covered as long as you are ready to do a little extra research on the various technologies to gain a deeper understanding of what is going on.

In short, if you are using Silverlight and building dashboards of any sort I would recommend this book.

On a side note, the code samples have words mashed together without spaces making the code very hard to read.