Customer Reviews

Practical Silverlight Programming

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

 

 

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.