Practical Silverlight Programming [Paperback]

Jack Xu (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 2008

Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET-based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. With Silverlight, your Web development experience will much more closely resemble the development of desktop applications using WPF. Ultimately, the goal of Silverlight is to create Web applications that are indistinguishable from desktop applications. "Practical Silverlight Programming" provides everything you need to create advanced graphics and user interfaces in your Web applications using Silverlight 2. From simple user interfaces and 2D shapes to complex custom user controls, game physics, and 3D graphics objects, the book uses code examples to clearly explain every step it takes to build a variety of Silverlight applications. You'll learn how to use Silverlight to develop impressive graphics effects and high-fidelity user interfaces. This book includes a complete, in-depth instruction on practical programming using Silverlight 2. After reading this book and running the example programs, you will be able to add various sophisticated graphics and interactive user interfaces to your Web applications. The 100 ready-to-run example programs in the book allow you to explore the details of UI and graphics programming techniques. You can modify the code examples or add new features to them to form the basis of your own projects. Some of the example code listings provided in this book are already sophisticated graphics and user interfaces that can be used directly in your own real-world Silverlight applications. Please visit the author's website for more information about this book at www.drxudotnet.com

Product Details

• Paperback: 484 pages
• Publisher: UniCAD, Inc. (August 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0979372526
• ISBN-13: 978-0979372520
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,422,141 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Advanced Graphics Tutorials, Good Discussion of Differences between Silverlight and WPF, September 27, 2008

By 

Techie Evan - See all my reviews

This review is from: Practical Silverlight Programming (Paperback)

This is not a general book on Silverlight. You will not find discussions, for example, on how to build multi-page applications. Also, even though there is some discussion of user interface topics such as how to use the new DataGrid, how to style controls, and how to create custom controls etc, this book is mostly about 2D and 3D Graphics, Colors and Brushes, and Animations.

Having learned WPF before Silverlight, I appreciated the author's discussions of API differences between the two frameworks. In some cases where Silverlight lacks support for some WPF features, the author provided workarounds or showed readers how to rollout their own approximations (for example: use RectangleGeometry to workaround the lack of a ClipToBounds Property support, how to rollout your own PathGeometry-based Animations and 3D Graphics not yet supported in Silverlight).

The materials in this book overlap with those in another of the author's well-received book entitled "Practical WPF Graphics Programming". So if you already own that book, you may want to think twice about getting this book as well.

With a few exceptions, the code samples in this book will run on Silverlight 2 Beta 2 with no problems (those that cannot be run involve features not included on the current version of Beta 2, as explained by the author).

Overall, I'm giving this book a rating of 5 for the advanced graphics tutorials, as well as the great tips on how to cope with some of the differences between Silverlight and WPF, even though I was disappointed with the lackluster coverage of user interface topics.