Pro Business Applications with Silverlight 4 [Paperback]

Chris Anderson (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1430272074 | ISBN-13: 978-1430272076 | Publication Date: December 1, 2009 | Edition: 1

Silverlight 4 has the potential to revolutionize the way we build business applications. With its flexibility, web deployment, cross-platform capabilities, rich .NET language support on the client, rich user interface control set, small runtime, and more, it comes close to the perfect platform in which to build business applications. It's a very powerful technology, and despite its relative youth, it's moving forward at a rapid pace and is gaining widespread adoption.

This book will guide you through the process of designing and developing enterprise-strength business applications in Silverlight 4 and C#. You will learn how to take advantage of the power of Silverlight to develop rich and robust business applications, from getting started to deployment, and everything in between.

In particular, this book will serve developers who want to learn how to design business applications, and tackle the issues that you'll face, and how to resolve them. Chris Anderson demonstrates his experience through a candid presentation of how to approach real-life implementation decisions.

With this book in hand, you will

• Create a fully functional business application in Silverlight
• Discover how to satisfy all of the common requirements that most business applications share

What you'll learn

• How to structure your project to ensure a robust and maintainable application
• How to create user interfaces with XAML and bind controls to data
• How to communicate securely between the server and the client
• How to view and maintain data within a Silverlight user interface
• How to implement standard business application paradigms in Silverlight

Who is this book for?

This book is for developers experienced in other .NET technologies, such as WinForms or ASP.NET, looking to translate their existing skills to developing business applications with Silverlight.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Getting Started with Sliverlight
3. An Introduction to XAML
4. The Navigation Framework
5. Exposing Data From The Server
6. Implementing Summary Lists
7. Building Data Entry Forms
8. Securing Your Application
9. Styling Your Application
10. Advanced XAML and Data Binding
11. Creating Custom Controls
12. The Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) Design Pattern
13. Reporting and Printing
14. Out of Browser Mode, and Interacting with the Operating System
15. Application Deployment

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Chris Anderson has been a professional developer for over 10 years now, specializing in building desktop, web, and mobile business applications using Microsoft technologies for industries as wide ranging as accounting, property valuation, mining, the fresh produce industry, logistics, field services, sales, and construction. Now running his own business he has turned to Silverlight as the ideal new technology for developing and deploying business applications. Chris currently resides in Sydney, Australia.

Product Details

• Paperback: 500 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (December 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430272074
• ISBN-13: 978-1430272076
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 7.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #313,572 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Chris Anderson has been a professional developer for over 10 years now, specializing in building desktop, web, and mobile business applications using Microsoft technologies for industries as wide ranging as accounting, property valuation, mining, the fresh produce industry, pet cremations, logistics, field services, sales, and construction. Now running his own business (Peer Placements, as co-director) he has turned to Silverlight as the ideal new technology for developing and deploying business applications. Chris is the author of the upcoming book Pro Business Applications in Silverlight 4 (Apress), and was a co-author to Professional Visual Studio 2010 (Wrox).

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Another Silverlight book you could take or leave, September 7, 2010

By 

T. Anderson (PA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Pro Business Applications with Silverlight 4 (Paperback)

This book sounded great and is structured to appear great. There is just way too much chatter going on. The author takes an around about way to approaching almost all the topics.

MVVM is not rocket science, but the way the author approaches it, you'd think you are about to learn how to do brain surgery while building a rocket, and then he explains how to remove a splinter. There was way too much chatter about how controversial the MVVM pattern is in this chapter.

As of now there is no code available. If the author gets some code out, it may help. He explains a lot of situations that should have been presented with a screenshot or some sample code.

I think the chapter on WCF RIA Services will confuse the heck out of someone approaching it for the first time. It confused me, and I have put together a lot of training on it.

At first I thought I would like the index. It is very thorough. It is 39 pages out of the 552. But as I started using it, I found it point to just about everything mentioned on a topic except for what I wanted to know. It just pointed to everything!!!!

As far as learning line of business application development, you are better off going with Introducing Silverlight 4 (Expert's Voice in Silverlight).

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Guide to Silverlight development for business, September 20, 2010

By 

Paul Free "Paul Free" (Atlanta) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pro Business Applications with Silverlight 4 (Paperback)

In Pro Business Applications with Silverlight 4, Chris Anderson lays out from beginning to end the steps necessary to create Silverlight-based business applications that fulfill the requirements currently met by ASP.NET and other web development platforms.

I read the book cover to cover in tutorial fashion with Visual Studio on hand to try some of the code and procedures. The process went smoothly with no backtracking or skipping ahead in the text necessary with the exception of a couple of minor problems with code and Visual Studio walkthroughs.

Chris mentions experience with C# and Visual Studio as prerequisites for the reader in Chapter 1, but since nearly every chapter contains XAML (an XML-based markup language), the reader should also have a basic understanding of XML. I found that ASP.NET experience was a big help as well.

There are two chapters dedicated to XAML. The first is an introduction, providing enough information for subsequent chapters. The second, later chapter covers more advanced features. The depth of information found in these chapters was more than I expected and reflects the importance of XAML expertise felt by the author.

Chapters 6 and 7 describe how to implement common user interface elements such as lists, drill down, data entry and validation. I was glad to see that these basic elements were covered. These easily account for 90% of my user interface work. Chapter 11 covers Silverlight user controls and custom controls. That took care of the other 10%.

Business applications require access to data stores. Several options to accomplish this are discussed, focusing mainly on WCF RIA Services. I thought that was an excellent choice as the Visual Studio code generation support for it reduces or eliminates the code that you need to write and maintain yet allows for extensive customization. Chris also presents a pretty good Visual Studio walkthrough of creating, modifying and consuming an RIA Service.

An entire chapter is devoted to the implementation of the Model-View-Viewmodel design pattern in Silverlight. As the author points out, creating a perfect implementation of MVVM is challenging and not always achievable, but the benefits of MVVM make it a worthy goal.

The book winds up with instruction on printing in various formats, running outside of the browser and deploying your new Silverlight application.

I've written a fair number of ASP.NET business applications in my time, so I naturally read the book with these past projects in mind. By the time I finished, I could not think of a single project that I could not now replicate with Silverlight using my newly acquired knowledge. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in developing Silverlight applications for business.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Migrating from WinForms to Silverlight? This is it!, August 26, 2010

By 

Nick Hrones "just learning" (Atlanta) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pro Business Applications with Silverlight 4 (Paperback)

Of all the Silverlight books I've read, this is the only one that explained the nuances of Silverlight in a style that a seasoned WinForms developer could easily comprehend.
I loved the logical flow and completeness of the material presented. Unlike other books on Silverlight, I didn't feel the need to flip back and forth to understand the current topic. The style and focus of the material helped me to understanding the underlying technology rather than just the tools used in development.