Professional Silverlight® 4

Chapter 11. Building Line of Business Applications

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Working with the mouse

• Printing from a Silverlight application

• Drag-and-drop support

• Communicating between Silverlight players

• Integrating with Microsoft Office applications

• Making full-screen applications

It's an exciting new age for software development. Rich Internet applications (RIAs) are quickly becoming the standard architecture chosen by a number of developers. In the past building RIA-based Line of Business (LOB) applications has been very challenging, especially when you to need handle the following key scenarios: printing, localizing, and integrating with Microsoft Office applications.

Silverlight 4 includes several new components and API(s) to address the challenges of building LOB applications to add context-sensitive menus, build a printer-friendly version of your application, integrate with Microsoft Excel or Word, and more. The Silverlight platform makes these and many other typical LOB scenarios easy to implement.

LINE OF BUSINESS BASICS

Silverlight includes several key features for easily building Line of Business applications. You can respond to mouse actions to display context menus, drag-and-drag items, and add Multi-Touch support to your application. The printing support introduced in Silverlight 4 allows you to print the contents of an entire screen, part of the screen or to build a printer friendly version of your screen. With each new release, Silverlight makes it easier to build Line of Business ...