Customer Reviews

Pro Business Applications with Silverlight 4

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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).

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.

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.

Book review - "Pro Silverlight 4 in C#, by Matthew Mac Donald
ISBN-13: 978-1-4302-2979-7

Hi, I have read several Silverlight 4.0 books, this book happens to be more "business application oriented", it is more focused on building lob (line of business) applications in Silverlight. Therefore, it concerns itself more with how to retrieve database data, update, apply business logic and validation etc.
The first couple of chapters are the standard "intro to Silverlight stuff" we would see in many Silverlight books. Things like what is Silverlight, how to get started with Silverlight, types of developer tools, what is XAML etc.
The really useful stuff starts at Chapter 4 in which the author talks about the Navigation Framework, which is basically what you get when you use the out of the box "business application Silverlight template" in Visual Studio 2010. The author does a good job at describing the nuances of this navigation framework so developers could understand how to add different views into your Silverlight business application.
Chapter 5 is really useful as it explains how and why to use WCF RIA services. In Silverlight, without some type of service layer (SOA), data cannot usually be retrieved from databases. In other words, Silverlight out relies on service calls, rather than SQL calls to get data from a database server. WCF RIA services is a neat "code generator" which can build much of the service plumbing (for both client and server side) from an existing database model (typically by using entity framework/linq or POCO objects). A more advanced topic that is also covered is how to create a WCF RIA services class library (dll) which allow greater reuse of RIA services among several Silverlight projects. Chapter 5, also explores the use of alternative service technologies such as WCF services, WCF DATA services (REST protocol) and even just plain HTTP requests (as in WebHTTP services).
Later chapters explore how to build data entry forms with Silverlight and how to "tie the data" via binding and other ways into the actual live database data. The author goes on to describe how to "validate the data" using special validator classes. In addition, once the author has built data entry forms, he explores how to submit the changes via change tracking and the "domain datasource control" which is part of RIA services. It really allows the programmer to hand the responsibility to RIA services and let RIA services determine how the data has changed and how to update the backend database. It is similar in concept to an entity framework update or insert (for those of you who have dealt with entity framework "contexts"...
Chapter 8, is a must read, because it describes how to secure your Silverlight business application. Many business applications require some level of security to restrict access to the application via some sort of login credential. In addition, the level of security (typically these are known as "roles") also may be necessary to use to determine what type of operations the user can perform within the Silverlight business application. Many times, with Silverlight, we would user either ASP.NET forms authentication (AKA membership API), or possibly windows security (which would be most likely used for internal company applications).
The author goes on to explain things like styling your application, more advanced user interface topics with XAML and also how to develop your own Silverlight "controls".
Chapter 12 is also a must read because it describes the MVVM design pattern that many Silverlight programmers are adopting as the structure of their applications. While there is plenty of different opinions on how to implement MVVM, the consensus is that it makes your application much easier to develop and understand from an application programmers perspective.
Chapter 13 is an interesting read on how to bundle in printing and reporting into your Silverlight applications. One of the most common approaches would be to use a sql server report definition (rdl) or (rdlc). You could then render the output as PDF using native sql server reporting calls and then show the report within your Silverlight business application. This is covered nicely in the chapter.
Later chapters describe features such as out of browser and how to deploy Silverlight business applications.

Conclusion: All in all, this book is quite different from more generic Silverlight 4 books, because it is focused more on what a Silverlight business application would be required to do. It is relatively concise, weighing in at about 550 pages. I was impressed with the knowledge I received from reading the book and feel it is a worthy addition for those inclined to building Silverlight 4 business applications. I would recommend this book.

This book has many typos which is not a big problem for learning the content, but is surprising.
The examples can be difficult to follow. Code is given but it does not tell you where or what file to put it in. Sometimes it will reference work you have done to your sample project when you cannot remember it telling you to do those tasks. It makes for some trial and error which, unintentionally, may help you learn better because figuring it out makes it stick more than just reading.
All in all I think it covers the subject well for developers who are not yet familiar with the technology.

The author has done a great job with using WCF RIA services, but unfortunately his MVVM section was very short and rushed. He had a great opportunity to do all his RIA in MVVM but chose to do code behind. It's too bad the opportunity was missed.

I purchased the Kindle version of this text; big mistake. You need the actual book in your hands so that you can page back and forth and refer to the TOC and/or the index over and over again. This is not an easy book to digest. It's one long narrative with very little supporting code and/or visual manifestation of said code. I don't know about you, but unless I'm parroting code and seeing the code results as I'm going along, I tend to lose interest. Well, imagine reading page upon page of XAML specs without seeing the code in action. Does that excite you? Indeed, I constantly lost interest and found myself re-reading pages over... and over.

Silverlight 4 may be ready for LOB applications and the definitive text on that subject is a real necessity for this complex technology. Unfortunately, this book isn't it.

The author does a good job of covering the steps to get started with building line-of-business applications using Silverlight 4 and WCF RIA Services. Unfortuantely, that is the only scenario that is covered. Should you have any desire or need to access any other service technology from your Silverlight application you are left out in the cold. REST services, (non RIA) WCF services, .NET asmx web services, and non-Microsoft web services are not covered. For this reason, I feel that this is much more of a beginners book than a 'Pro' level book as the title suggests. Similarly, the lightweight treatment given to the MVVM pattern is disappointing given that the line-of-business applications that this book targets are the sweet spot for using the MVVM pattern.

The coverage of XAML, data binding, custom controls and printing do a very good job of presenting the subject and I learned much from them. The application deployment chapter was great, it covered the subject well and had a very good explanation on customizing the Silverlight install process.
To the authors credit there were a few places in the book where he explicitly pointed out the namespace for a class that was used in some sample code.

Unfortunately, there are as many or more instances where he did not. This is a pet-peeve of mine and is by no means limited to this book. To be fair, most books, blog postings, examples and tutorials do an extremely poor job of this.
The organization of the material worked well when I used it as a step-by-step tutorial for building my first Silverlight/Ria Services project. It did not work as well when I used it as a reference tool. In the RIA services chapter I often had a difficult time determining whether the example code was server-side code or client-side code.

Overall, I found this book useful and I learned from it. But, if I were to get all of my Silverlight 4 information from one source, I would not want this book to be it.

Anderson's book is simply the best Silverlight 4 book for readers developing LOB/intranet and business web apps. It is well written and readable without being too verbose. It focuses on doing business/database web apps, which is what the vast majority of software architects and developers do. There is only one other published book Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook - also a very good one - that has a similar focus, but I think this one is a much better book, covering WCF RIA services in quite a deep and comprehensive manner. I think you may want to get both books, if you can. Coverage of topics such as printing, security, exception handling, localisation is also very good. It has little coverage on topics less relevant for most busines software (such as graphics and animation, business intelligence) which makes good sense to me as it stays faithful to its title and leaves these topics to other Silverlight books such as the soon-to-be-published Pro Silverlight 4 in C# and Silverlight 4 Business Intelligence Software. By trying to cover all topics in one book these other books tend to cover less fully and lucidly the key topics required by most developers.

Certain business app oriented topics I was a bit disappointed to find virtually missing include multi-threading and lower level network programming (e.g. socket programming, multicast, publish/subscribe) required for low-latency, high throughput application scenarios prevalent in the financial world where silverlight is becomming increasingly popular. The other, similar book Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook covers some of these topics, but imhop inadequately. In spite of that I still think this is a 5-star book, and I see it becoming as popular as Matthew MacDonald's Silverlight 2 & 3 books.

This book does exactly what it says it will - show you the way to develop business apps with Silverlight 4 (using C#). It is not a Silverlight 4 primer and you need to know the basics to digest its contents easily (like understanding XAML and the nuts and bolts of asynchronous data access). It covers every conceivable area of Silverlight 4's use as a business application platform. I found it easier to read alongside Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook as I had no prior experience of Silverlight (coming from ASP.Net and MVC background). It is a vast encyclopaedia of Silverlight 4 data handling and presentation for the business environment and is an essential reference work for anyone developing such apps in a commercial environment. The architecture of these apps is well covered from simple controls bound to the database to MVVM (Model View View-Model) separating all data from business logic and that from the presentation layer. RIA Services and the MS Entity Framework are well covered with particular attention to the nuts and bolts of how RIA Services automatically remodels itself into context entities from the parent web application to the hosted Silverlight application making data alterations to existing software much more straightforward.

The book sometimes degenerates from a tutorial into a collection of loosely connected Silverlight concepts and capabilities but this only detracts from it being a straight read rather than a lookup-when-you-need-to publication, a function at which the book excels.

I would not want to develop a Silverlight 4 business application without this book at my side.