Download or read book Pro Silverlight for the Enterprise written by Ashish Ghoda and published by Apress. This book was released on 2009-05-24 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Microsoft Silverlight 2 is a new development platform designed to make the development of rich Internet applications (RIAs) far easier than has previously been possible. Pro Silverlight for the Enterprise addresses the question of how you can bring Silverlight 2 to your company to provide rich Internet experiences that will interface cleanly with your existing application architecture. The book begins with a clear discussion of why Silverlight is such a good choice for developing RIAs and the implications that this has for your development decisions. The options available will be demonstrated by constructing a simple web–based training portal for a fictional enterprise, which will be extended and altered to demonstrate the techniques and methods that you have available to you. This includes accessing data using WCF and LINQ, and considering how best to deploy your finished Silverlight application when it is complete. The book also discusses the future of Silverlight for mobile and how to plan for its release. This book is unique in that it focuses on how Silverlight can be applied in today's business environment rather than simply delving into the product's syntax and grammar in isolation. Silverlight is discussed in context with consideration given to security, scalability, and deployment. As such this book makes an excellent addition to any Silverlight library and extends your knowledge into practical areas that are rarely discussed.

Download or read book Pro Business Applications with Silverlight 4 written by Chris Anderson and published by Apress. This book was released on 2010-09-19 with total page 565 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 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 introduce the patterns to use, the issues that you’ll face, and how to resolve them. Chris Anderson, who has been building line-of-business applications for years, demonstrates his experience through a candid presentation of how to tackle real-life issues, rather than just avoid them. Developers will benefit from his hard-won expertise through business application design patterns that he shares throughout the book. With this book in hand, you will Create a fully functional business application in Silverlight Discover how to satisfy all of the general requirements that most business applications need Develop a business application framework

Download or read book Pro Business Applications with Silverlight 5 written by Chris Anderson and published by Apress. This book was released on 2012-06-08 with total page 700 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Silverlight 5 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 on which to build business applications. It’s a very powerful technology, and despite its youth, it’s moving forward at a rapid pace and is gaining widespread popularity. This book guides you through the process of designing and developing enterprise-strength business applications in Silverlight 5 and C#. You'll 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. It will introduce the patterns you'll use, the issues you’ll face, and how to resolve them. Author Chris Anderson, who has been building line-of-business applications for years, demonstrates his expertise through a candid presentation of how to tackle real-life issues, rather than just avoiding them. Developers will benefit from his hard-won expertise through business application design patterns that he shares throughout the book. With this book in hand, you will: Create a fully-functional business application in Silverlight Discover how to satisfy the general requirements that most business applications need Develop a business application framework

Download or read book Microsoft Silverlight 5 and Windows Azure Enterprise Integration written by David Burela and published by Packt Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2012-03-19 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a step-by-step tutorial that shows you how to obtain the necessary toolset to create and run Silverlight Enterprise Applications on Azure. The book also covers techniques, practical tips, hints, and tricks for Silverlight interactions with Azure. Each topic is written in an easy-to-read style, with a detailed explanation given and then practical step-by-step exercises with a strong emphasis on real-world relevance. If you are an application developer who wants to build and run Silverlight Enterprise applications using Azure storage, WCF Services, and ASP providers, then this book is for you. You should have a working knowledge of Silverlight and Expression Blend. However, knowledge of Azure is not required since the book covers how to integrate the two technologies in detail.

Download or read book Microsoft Silverlight 4 written by Todd Snyder and published by Packt Pub Limited. This book was released on 2011-09 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a concise and practical tutorial that shows you how to create, customize and design rich enterprise dashboards with Silverlight. If you are a .Net developer who wants to create, customize and design rich enterprise dashboards with Silverlight, then this book is for you. You should have an intermediate understanding of .Net development, with a working knowledge of Microsoft Silverlight.

Download or read book Introducing Silverlight 4 written by Ashish Ghoda and published by Apress. This book was released on 2011-01-11 with total page 732 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introducing Silverlight 4 brings you up to speed with version 4 of Silverlight quickly and efficiently. The book builds off your understanding of the basics of .NET coding and WPF, allowing your journey to Silverlight 4 proficiency to be as quick and painless as possible. The text highlights where coding techniques are similar to other, more established areas of the .NET framework. Likewise, when your existing coding habits lead you to a syntax or conceptual ’gotcha,’ the text points that out, too. This book provides you with fast-track coverage of all the most important elements of the Silverlight 4 technology ranging from XAML to standard controls, from dealing with media to networking, from testing to deployment. It also reveals features introduced with Silverlight 4 and offers guidance on how to best utilize them. The book concludes with a pair of fully worked sample applications for you to follow through, because nothing reinforces your understanding of how concepts fit together as much as looking at finished code. It is assumed that readers are already be comfortable with the workings of the .NET framework. Knowledge of Expression Blend is useful, but not mandatory: you’ll learn the Blend techniques that you need to know as you go through the book. By the end, you will have followed a sound, concise path to mastery of Silverlight 4.

Download or read book Accelerated Silverlight 3 written by Jeff Scanlon and published by Apress. This book was released on 2009-10-17 with total page 499 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accelerated Silverlight 3 teaches you how to get up to speed with the latest version of Silverlight quickly and efficiently. The book assumes you're already comfortable with the basics of .NET coding and with WPF and builds on your existing knowledge to make your journey to Silverlight 3 proficiency as quick and painless as possible. Where coding techniques are similar to other, more established, areas of .NET, the text says so. Likewise, where there's a syntax or conceptual "gotcha" that you're existing coding habits will walk you into, the text points that out, too. This book provides you with fast-track coverage of all the most important elements of the Silverlight 3 technology ranging from XAML to standard controls, from dealing with media to networking, from testing to deployment. It concludes with a pair of fully worked sample applications for you to follow through, because nothing reinforces your understanding of how concepts fit together as much as looking at finished code. It is assumed that readers are already be comfortable with the workings of the .NET framework. Knowledge of Expression Blend is useful, but not mandatory: you'll learn the Blend techniques that you need to know as you go through the book. By the end, you will have followed a sound, concise, path to mastery of Silverlight 3.

Download or read book Designing Silverlight Business Applications written by Jeremy Likness and published by Addison-Wesley. This book was released on 2012-03-28 with total page 843 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Build Highly Usable, High-Performance Business Applications with Silverlight 5 Microsoft Silverlight MVP and Wintellect Consultant Jeremy Likness gives you all the hands-on guidance and proven patterns and practices you need to build scalable, maintainable, and highly professional applications for multiple platforms and browsers. In this first complete guide to designing Silverlight applications for commercial use, Likness focuses on the advanced Silverlight features most directly related to solving real-world business problems and demonstrates how these features fit together in production-quality applications. Written from the ground up, this book covers every key area of enterprise Silverlight development. For each, Likness introduces the opportunities and capabilities Silverlight provides, offers relevant case studies from actual projects, presents complete C# code samples, and explains them in detail. Every chapter concludes with a summary highlighting the specific information and techniques most important for developers to consider. Coverage includes • Discovering why Silverlight is superior to HTML5/JavaScript for most line-of-business applications • Leveraging Silverlight 5’s powerful enhancements to performance, text, printing, usability, security, and programmability • Effectively applying Silverlight’s application cycle in enterprise applications • Using XAML to drive Silverlight’s visual interface • Quickly transforming raw data into visually appealing information • Using Silverlight’s innovative Visual State Manager and data binding to separate design, UI/UX experience, and business logic • Simplifying development with the MVVM pattern • Using MEF to integrate modular code into highly extensible, maintainable, and testable Silverlight applications • Improving and automating testing with Silverlight Unit Testing Framework and third-party add-ons • Mastering each leading approach to navigation and implementing the best one for your application • Implementing the service layer, persistence, and state management • Building advanced “out-of-browser” applications • Integrating sophisticated line-of-business features into your solutions • Optimizing the performance of your Silverlight applications This book will be invaluable for all experienced client developers who use Microsoft’s technology stack and want to leverage Silverlight’s immense power; and for every Silverlight developer seeking to improve existing line-of-business applications with the new Silverlight 5.

Download or read book Professional Silverlight 4 written by Jason Beres and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2010-07-23 with total page 1026 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everything .NET developers need to take advantage of Silverlight 4 Silverlight 4 is a major new release of Microsoft's flagship product for building rich, interactive applications that combine animation, graphics, audio, and video. This book, by seasoned Wrox authors and Silverlight experts, gives professional Web developers all the tools necessary to build RIAs using the new Silverlight capabilities. You will gain a complete, thorough understanding of both core and advanced platform concepts, with examples in C#. Professional Silverlight 4 prepares Web developers to take full advantage of the newest release of the most popular platform for developing rich interactive applications. Coverage Includes: Introduction to Silverlight Building Applications with Visual Studio Building Applications with Expression Blend 4 Working with the Navigation Framework Controlling Layout with Panels Working with Visual Controls Accessing Data WCF RIA Services Out-of-Browser Experiences Networking Applications Building Line of Business Applications Application Architecture DOM Interaction Securing Your Applications Accessing Audio and Video Devices Working with File I/O Using Graphics and Visuals Working with Animations in Silverlight Working with Text Making It Richer with Media Styling and Themes

Download or read book Pro Silverlight 5 in C written by Matthew MacDonald and published by Apress. This book was released on 2012-06-10 with total page 969 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Silverlight 5 is the latest iteration of Microsoft's cross-browser technology for creating rich user experiences on the Web. Like its predecessor, it rides atop the .NET Framework for maximum ease of use and coding efficiency. The new technology carries forward much of the work that has been done before and augments it in many important respects, including support for H.264 video, major improvements to the graphics engine (including true 3D rendering), and much richer data-binding options for interfacing with other applications. Pro Silverlight 5 in C# is an invaluable reference for professional developers who want to discover the new features of Silverlight. Author Matthew MacDonald's expert advice guides you through creating rich media applications using Silverlight in the environment you're most productive in—no matter what the target platform. As you learn about the features that put Silverlight in direct competition with Adobe Flash, such as rich support for 2D and 3D drawing, animations, and media playback, you'll experience the plumbing of .NET and the design model of WPF through Silverlight—all of the same .NET technology that developers use to design next-generation Windows applications. Pro Silverlight 5 in C# is a comprehensive tutorial, written from professional developer to professional developer. Please note: the print version of this title is black & white; the eBook is full color.

Download or read book Professional F 2 0 written by Ted Neward and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2010-10-28 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book on the F# programming language. On the surface of things, that is an intuitively obvious statement, given the title of this book. However, despite the apparent redundancy in saying it aloud, the sentence above elegantly describes what this book is about: The authors are not attempting to teach developers how to accomplish tasks from other languages in this one, nor are they attempting to evangelize the language or its feature set or its use "over" other languages. They assume that you are considering this book because you have an interest in learning the F# language: its syntax, its semantics, its pros and cons, and its use in concert with other parts of the .NET ecosystem. The intended reader is a .NET developer, familiar with at least one of the programming languages in the .NET ecosystem. That language might be C# or Visual Basic, or perhaps C++/CLI, IronPython or IronRuby.

Download or read book Silverlight 4 Business Intelligence Software written by Bart Czernicki and published by Apress. This book was released on 2011-01-27 with total page 567 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Business intelligence (BI) software allows you to view different components of a business using a single visual platform, which makes comprehending mountains of data easier. BI is everywhere. Applications that include reports, analytics, statistics, and historical and predictive modeling are all examples of business intelligence. Currently, we are in the second generation of business intelligence software—called BI 2.0—which is focused on writing business intelligence software that is predictive, adaptive, simple, and interactive. As computers and software have evolved, more data can be presented to end users with increasingly visually rich techniques. Rich Internet application (RIA) technologies such as Microsoft Silverlight can be used to transform traditional user-interfaces filled with boring data into fully interactive analytical applications that quickly deliver insight from large data sets. Furthermore, RIAs now include 3D spatial-design capabilities that move beyond a simple list or grid and allow for interesting layouts of aggregated data. BI 2.0 implemented via an RIA technology can truly bring out the power of business intelligence and deliver it to an average user on the Web. Silverlight 4 Business Intelligence Software provides developers, designers, and architects with a solid foundation in business intelligence design and architecture concepts for Microsoft Silverlight. This book covers key business intelligence design concepts and how they can be applied without an existing BI infrastructure. Author Bart Czernicki provides you with examples of how to build small BI applications that are interactive, highly visual, statistical, predictive—and most importantly—intuitive to the end-user. Business intelligence isn’t just for the executive branch of a Fortune 500 company—it is for the masses. Let Silverlight 4 Business Intelligence Software show you how to unlock the rich intelligence you already have.

Download or read book Pro Silverlight 5 in VB written by Matthew MacDonald and published by Apress. This book was released on 2012-06-12 with total page 964 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Silverlight 5 is the latest iteration of Microsoft's cross-browser technology for creating rich user experiences on the Web. Like its predecessor, Silverlight 4, it rides atop the .NET Framework for maximum ease of use and coding efficiency. The new technology carries forward much of the work that has been done before and augments it in many important respects, including support for H.264 video, major improvements to the graphics engine (including true 3D rendering), and much richer data-binding options for interfacing with other applications. Pro Silverlight 5 in VB is an invaluable reference for professional developers wanting to discover the new features of Silverlight. Author Matthew MacDonald's expert advice guides you through creating rich media applications using Silverlight in the environment you're most productive in—no matter what the target platform. As you learn about the features that put Silverlight in direct competition with Adobe Flash, such as rich support for 2D and 3D drawing, animations, and media playback, you'll experience the plumbing of .NET and the design model of WPF through Silverlight—all of the same .NET technology that developers use to design next-generation Windows applications. MacDonald provides a comprehensive tutorial written from professional developer to professional developer.

Download or read book MVVM Survival Guide for Enterprise Architectures in Silverlight and WPF written by Ryan Vice and published by Packt Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2012-08-03 with total page 753 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eliminate unnecessary code by taking advantage of the MVVM pattern in Silverlight and WPF using this book and eBook ? less code, fewer bugs

Download or read book Developing Silverlight Line of Business Applications with the Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Silverlight written by Jeremi Bourgault and published by Microsoft patterns & practices. This book was released on 2011-05-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you need to solve enterprise software development challenges such as validation, caching, logging, and exception handling in your Silverlight line-of business applications, the Silverlight Integration Pack for Enterprise Library 5.0 can help. It provides guidance and reusable Silverlight components designed to encapsulate recommended practices that facilitate consistency, ease of use, integration, and extensibility. It also helps you port your existing line-of-business applications that already use Enterprise Library to Silverlight. Note that the integration pack does not cover Silverlight for Windows Phone. This guide will help you make the most of the Silverlight Integration Pack for Enterprise Library 5.0. It is focused on the desktop Silverlight platform and comes with an accompanying reference implementation to demonstrate how you can leverage Enterprise Library in a Silverlight application. It covers the Validation, Caching, Logging, Exception Handling, and Policy Injection Application Blocks. Each chapter contains an overview of an application block, various techniques for applying the block, and a description of how that block was applied in the reference implementation so you can begin realizing the benefits of the Silverlight Integration Pack for Enterprise Library 5.0. This guide primarily targets software developers and software architects who are building LOB applications in Silverlight. It assumes you have a basic understanding of Silverlight. In certain instances, it will also describe how you can use Enterprise Library to extend technologies such as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), WCF RIA Services and WCF Data Services.

Download or read book Professional Silverlight 2 for ASP NET Developers written by Jonathan Swift and published by Wrox. This book was released on 2009-02-03 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our overarching goal in writing this book was to give ASP.NET developers the power to quickly and easily create visually stunning Internet applications, coupled with rich interactivity to fully immerse the user in a new online experience. Silverlight gives you everything you need to do just this, and in serious style! As well as taking you through each feature that ships with Silverlight, this book will make sure you’re able to debug, troubleshoot, and performance-tune your Silverlight applications, as well as seamlessly hook into your existing ASP.NET architecture and code base. This book is aimed at .NET developers and architects who want to quickly get up to speed with all that Silverlight 2 has to offer. As well as covering the breadth of features that Silverlight 2 provides, this book makes a point of demonstrating where necessary how the particular feature can be integrated tightly with the ASP.NET host application. An example is in Chapter 7, where the ASP.NET Profile service is utilized directly from within Silverlight to obtain user-specific data. It’s fair to say that although this book is aimed at ASP.NET developers, it covers all of the salient features of Silverlight 2 to the degree that it’s a useful programming resource for developers not using ASP.NET also. If you’re fresh to .NET development, however, you might want to check out a beginning .NET book first, to help you overcome the syntax and set-up queries when learning a new language. Otherwise, take a deep breath and dive in! This book covers the full feature set of Silverlight 2, diving into each of the subject areas to give depth and breadth coverage. As well as teaching you about the component parts of the Silverlight API, the book also covers debugging, troubleshooting, and performance-tuning your Silverlight applications, arming you with all the skills and knowledge you’ll need to create advanced Silverlight-based applications in record time. Importantly, this book covers the integration points between ASP.NET and Silverlight, taking you through the different techniques you can use to seamlessly augment your existing or new ASP.NET web sites with the power of Silverlight. If you want to program in Silverlight and potentially use ASP.NET as the host, then this book covers it all. The book is split into two distinct parts. Part I is titled “Silverlight Fundamentals for ASP.NET Developers,” and Part II is titled “Developing ASP.NET Applications with Silverlight.” Part I is intended to give you grounding in what Silverlight is as a technology and how it fits into the Web-based landscape. The component pieces of a Silverlight application are also laid out at a high level, and any knowledge required before putting an application together is explained. Part II is written to give you depth of knowledge across the Silverlight feature-set and show you how to leverage the power of both Silverlight and ASP.NET to create compelling applications. A brief synopsis of the content follows: “Silverlight in a Nutshell”—This will teach you at a high level what Silverlight is and how it can help you deliver engaging, immersive web applications. Differentiating Silverlight from other Web-based technologies is also covered here, and a description of the required development environment is provided. In short, after reading this, you’ll be able to describe Silverlight and explain why you’d want to use it and what gives it the edge over the competition. “Silverlight Architecture”—Silverlight allows you to rapidly build a well-rounded application with a great user interface, but if you encounter any problems during development, it is going to be important for you to understand the underlying architecture upon which you are developing. This outlines the core features of Silverlight 2 and guides you around the building blocks of this highly flexible framework, paying particular attention throughout to your ASP.NET heritage. “XAML Condensed”—Quickly getting up to speed with XAML is what this is all about, helping you brush aside the syntax queries and get to grips with the basics of this multi-purpose declarative language. Hooking the XAML files up to .NET code is also shown here, helping you inject dynamic event-driven actions into your Silverlight UI. Finally, one technique for the dynamic creation of XAML is shown, followed by a tour of Expression Blend. “Programming Silverlight”—By the time you get here, you’ll be itching to start coding, and code you will as the feature-agnostic programming constructs that make up a Silverlight application are covered in detail. The composition of a Silverlight application is laid bare and its constituent parts explained at length, as well as detailing the Silverlight application lifetime and how to hook into it. The different options for embedding the Silverlight plug-in within your application are covered, followed by a brief overview of JavaScript and its associated DOM. This then leads onto a discussion of the Silverlight Object Model, explaining how the visual tree is constructed to form the UI. Another technique for dynamically creating XAML and adding it to the visual tree is also shown here. Finally, the Silverlight event model, browser interaction, and threading model are covered for you. “Creating the User Interface”—You now know how to program Silverlight and how to write XAML. This shows you how to put it all together to start laying out the user interface of your Silverlight application. Each of the layout controls that ship with Silverlight is covered here—Canvas, Grid, StackPanel, and TabControl—including information on when to use which one. Information on how to create a scalable UI is also provided, followed finally by a section that details how to localize your application, thereby making it available to other languages and cultures. “Silverlight Controls”—Silverlight 2 provides an assortment of controls that can be used to display and capture data. In this, you’ll learn to work with user input controls, items controls, and media controls and see how they can be put to use to build interactive and rich user interfaces. You’ll also learn how to use controls such as the MultiScaleImage control to work with Silverlight’s Deep Zoom technology. “Styles and Templates”—Altering the look and feel of your application is the crux here, with the different techniques for applying styling information to the controls that comprise it demonstrated here. As well as this, integrating with the ASP.NET Profile service via WCF is detailed, giving you the ability to personalize your Silverlight application on a per-user basis. “User Interaction”—What’s the point of having a great technology like Silverlight 2 if we can’t interact with it? We review the different ways that you can interact with your application, understanding how the UIElements work with input devices like the keyboard, mouse, and stylus. We also explore the different ways to navigate around the application and present the different options that we have and in which scenarios each one is preferred. “Communicating with the Server”—The ability to access data located at distributed sources is key in many Silverlight 2 applications. You learn different networking technologies that are available and see how they can be put to use. Several different topics are covered such as creating and calling ASMX and WCF services, calling REST APIs, working with JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) data, pushing data from a server to a client with sockets, and leveraging HTTP Polling Duplex functionality. “Working with Data”—It is all about data! One of my colleagues always says, “If you are not using data binding in Silverlight 2, you are doing something wrong!” This explains the data framework available within your applications and then deeps dive into the inner workings of data binding, showing you the different approaches that you may take. In order to understand how the data is retrieved, we explain the different technologies and techniques to get the most of Silverlight 2 data using the available data controls. Finally, this explains how you can manipulate the data using LINQ and LINQ to XML. “Creating Custom Controls”—This will take you on a journey in order to discover the different options that you have available to customize the Silverlight 2 controls. We start exploring the user control model that ASP.NET developers are used to, and then we dig into the internals of visual customization. You will be amazed by this powerful new model. Finally, for those who need to push the technology to the limit, this explains how to create a complete custom control from scratch. “Securing Your Silverlight Application”—Whether you’re an Enterprise developer or a Silverlight hobbyist, you are going to want to release your application out to the wild at some point. In doing so, you are providing a high level of exposure to your application, and therefore security should not be an afterthought. Thankfully, Silverlight 2 has a security framework built into the run time, which will give you the peace of mind of working within a secure environment. This introduces you to the Silverlight security framework, but also talks you through your security responsibilities as a Silverlight developer. “Audio and Video”—Embedding high-fidelity audio and video in your Silverlight application is sure to capture your users’ imaginations, and this shows you how you can do just this using the Silverlight-provided MediaElement control and the ASP.NET Media Server Control. Playback control is demonstrated, as is the more advanced topic of providing synchronization points within your chosen media. This will definitely help you put the WOW factor into your web sites. “Graphics and Animation”—A detailed tour of the graphics API that ships with Silverlight is first discussed here, including the Shape-derived objects that can be rendered to screen and also the Geometry-derived objects that can be created and then rendered via a Path object. Brush objects are covered next, demonstrating the SolidColorBrush, LinearGradientBrush, RadialGradientBrush, ImageBrush, and VideoBrush, and their usage. Next up is the very cool DeepZoom technology, covering the creation of DeepZoom-enabled images using the DeepZoom Composer and their usage in your Silverlight application via the MultiScaleImage control. Finally, the different animation techniques that you can use within your Silverlight application are covered, ranging from the basic From/To/By type to the more advanced Key frame types, including the different transition mechanisms within. “Troubleshooting Silverlight Applications”—Writing an application from start to finish without any development issues is still quite some way off. This introduces you to a range of techniques and tools to help you through the hard times when your application isn’t behaving as you would expect it to. Besides retrospectively fixing problems within your application, this concludes with the more proactive approach of ensuring that your application hits a known quality bar before you are satisfied that it is ready to be released. Silverlight’s testing framework is the flavor of the day here. “Performance”—Silverlight is an incredibly powerful and flexible framework. Its inherent flexibility often means that there are several ways to achieve your goals. In choosing an alternative path, you will often find that the penalty is poor performance. This gives a series of best-practice advice to allow you to make an informed decision when you hit those forks in the road. In addition, you will learn how to instrument your code in order to simply identify the bottlenecks within your application. To get the most out of this book, it’s recommended that you code along with the examples provided, either by copying the code shown in the chapters or by downloading the samples and running them yourself. To do this, you’re going to need Visual Studio 2008, which is available to download from MSDN, provided you have a subscription. As well as this, you’ll also need to download and install the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008, which allows you to create Silverlight-based applications within Visual Studio. This install will also take care of installing the Silverlight run time and SDK for you. You can download this installer from www.silverlight.net/getstarted. If you want to follow the examples that use Microsoft Expression Blend or the Deep Zoom Composer, you can also download these from www.silverlight.net/getstarted. As well as these software requirements, you will need a basic working development knowledge of Microsoft .NET and have experience in Web-based development. A passion for creating rich web applications is advantageous, although not necessary!

Download or read book Pro Silverlight 4 in VB written by Matthew MacDonald and published by Apress. This book was released on 2011-09-26 with total page 883 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Silverlight is Microsoft's cross-browser technology for creating rich user experiences on the Web. Like its predecessor, Silverlight 4 rides atop the .NET framework for maximum ease of use and coding efficiency. The technology carries forward much of the work that has been done before and augments it in many important respects, including support for H.264 video, major improvements to the graphics engine (including true 3D rendering), and much richer data-binding options for interfacing with other applications. Pro Silverlight 4 in VB is an invaluable reference for professional developers who want to discover the features of Silverlight. Author Matthew MacDonald's expert advice guides you through creating rich media applications using Silverlight in the environment you're most productive in—no matter what the target platform. As you learn about the features that put Silverlight in direct competition with Adobe Flash, such as rich support for 2D and 3D drawing, animations, and media playback, you'll experience the plumbing of .NET and the design model of WPF through Silverlight—all of the same .NET technology that developers use to design next-generation Windows applications. In this book, MacDonald provides a comprehensive tutorial written from professional developer to professional developer.