Customer Reviews

Pro Silverlight 3 in VB (Books for Professionals by Professionals)

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Great job on this one. The author is highly knowledgeable about Silverlight and spares no detail. His enthusiasm for the technology shows in his writing. Very exciting and detailed way to learn Silverlight and all its massive capabilities. I definitely recommend the book for VB programmers.

This book is by far the best resource for Silverlight 3.0. In this version the author added a whopping 185 pages to the last edition. He added chapters on Data Controls, separated the Styles, Templates, and Custom Controls into two separate chapters name Styles and Behaviors, and Templates and Custom Controls, and added a new chapter on Navigation.

I have bought 3 other books on Silverlight 3, and put together they only contain about 1/8 of the value of this book (you can see which ones they are by Googling "Shiny Turds Books that do not Cut the Mustard"). I have bought 2 copies of this book, both the C# and the VB.NET version.

It starts out with an introduction that covers the Visual Studio Silverlight environment. He then gives a short introduction to XAML. The introductions really help those who have no experience get rolling right away.

The author covers every out of the box element in detail (including the DataGrid control and a little on the DataForm control), and includes a nice reference for where the element can be found in the book. He also covers styles and templates, brushes and transforms, shapes and geometries, animation, and layout containers.

The book covers out-of-browser applications, assembly caching, networking, multithreading, isolated storage, browser integration, media and deep zoom, wcf services, the application model, and dependency properties and routed events.

One of the things I like best about the book is it includes a lot of references and material on the Silverlight Toolkit.

The book is very readable for those that like to read cover to cover, but it also makes a great reference.

The downloadable code is very usable and very complete.

This is a must have book for any developer working with Silverlight 3.0.