Book description
Over 80 practical recipes for creating rich, data-driven business applications in Silverlight
- Design and develop rich data-driven business applications in Silverlight
- Rapidly interact with and handle multiple sources of data and services within Silverlight business applications
- Understand sophisticated data access techniques in your Silverlight business applications by binding data to Silverlight controls, validating data in Silverlight, getting data from services into Silverlight applications and much more!
- Packed with practical, hands-on cookbook recipes, illustrating the techniques to solve particular data problems effectively within your Silverlight business applications
In Detail
Microsoft Silverlight is a programmable web browser plugin that enables features including animation, vector graphics, and audio-video playback – features that characterize Rich Internet Applications. However, Silverlight is a great (and growing) Line-Of-Business platform and is increasingly being used to build data-driven business applications. Silverlight Data Services enable efficient access to your data, allowing you to draw on multiple sources of data and solve particular data problems. There is very little existing material that demonstrates how to build data-driven solutions with the platform. Silverlight 3 made a big step into Line-Of-Business data services and Silverlight 4 builds further upon this. This book will enable .NET developers to get their finger on the pulse of data-driven business applications in Silverlight.
This book is not a general Silverlight 3/4 overview book; it is uniquely aimed at developers who want to build data-driven applications. It focuses on showing .NET developers how to interact with, and handle multiple sources of data in Silverlight business applications, and how to solve particular data problems following a practical hands-on approach, using real-world recipes. It is a practical cookbook that teaches you how to build data-rich business applications with Silverlight that draw on multiple sources of data. Most of the covered features work both in Silverlight 3 and 4. However, we cover some that are specific for Silverlight 4, which will therefore not work with Silverlight 3. Where this is the case, it is clearly indicated.
Packed with reusable, real-world recipes, the book begins by introducing you to general principles when programming Silverlight. It then dives deep into the world of data services, covering all the options available to access data and communicate with services to get the most out of data in your Silverlight business applications, whilst at the same time providing a rich user experience. Chapters cover data binding, data controls, the concepts of talking to services, communicating with WCF, ASMX and REST services, and much more.
By following the practical recipes in this book, which are of varying difficulty levels, you will learn the concepts needed to create data-rich business applications—from the creation of a Silverlight application, to displaying data in the Silverlight application and upgrading your existing applications to use Silverlight. Each recipe covers a data services topic, going from the description of the problem, through a conceptual solution to a solution containing sample code.
Build smart data-driaven business applications with Silverlight
Table of contents
-
Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook
- Table of Contents
- Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook
- Credits
- About the authors
- About the reviewers
- Preface
-
1. Learning the Nuts and Bolts of Silverlight 4
- Introduction
- Getting our environment ready to start developing Silverlight applications
- Creating our first service-enabled and data-driven Silverlight 4 application using Visual Studio 2010
- Using the workflow between Visual Studio 2010 and Blend 4
- Using source control in Visual Studio 2010 and Blend 4
- Deploying a Silverlight application on the server
-
2. An Introduction to Data Binding
- Introduction
- Displaying data in Silverlight applications
- Creating dynamic bindings
- Binding data to another UI element
- Binding collections to UI elements
- Enabling a Silverlight application to automatically update its UI
- Obtaining data from any UI element it is bound to
- Using the different modes of data binding to allow persisting data
- Data binding from Expression Blend 4
- Using Expression Blend 4 for sample data generation
-
3. Advanced Data Binding
- Introduction
- Hooking into the data binding process
- Replacing converters with Silverlight 4 BindingBase properties
- Validating databound input
- Validating data input using attributes
- Validating using IDataErrorInfo and INotifyDataErrorInfo
- Using templates to customize the way data is shown by controls
- Building a change-aware collection type
- Combining converters, data binding, and DataContext into a custom DataTemplate
- 4. The Data Grid
- 5. The DataForm
-
6. Talking to Services
- Introduction
- Connecting and reading from a standardized service
- Persisting data using a standardized service
- Configuring cross-domain calls
- Working cross-domain from a trusted Silverlight application
- Reading XML using HttpWebRequest
- Reading out an RSS feed
- Aggregating RSS feeds
- Talking with services in the Windows Azure cloud
- Persisting data to and reading data from the Windows Azure cloud
- Using socket communication in Silverlight
-
7. Talking to WCF and ASMX Services
- Introduction
- Invoking a service that exposes data
- Invoking a service such as Bing.com
- Handling faults when calling a service
- Optimizing performance using binary XML
- Using duplex communication
- Using duplex communication with the WCF net.tcp binding
- Debugging a service in Silverlight
- Ensuring data is encrypted
- Securing service communication using message-based security
- Uploading files to a WCF service
- Displaying images as a stream from a WCF service
- Hooking into proxy creation using slsvcutil.exe
- Calling a WCF service from Silverlight using ChannelFactory
-
8. Talking to REST and WCF Data Services
- Introduction
- Reading data from a REST service
- Parsing REST results with LINQ-To-XML
- Persisting data using a REST service
- Working with the ClientHttpStack
- Communicating with a REST service using JSON
- Using WCF Data Services with Silverlight
- Reading data using WCF Data Services
- Persisting data using WCF Data Services
- Talking to Flickr
- Talking to Twitter over REST
- Passing credentials and cross-domain access to Twitter from a trusted Silverlight application
-
9. Talking to WCF RIA Services
- Introduction
- Setting up a data solution to work with RIA Services
- Getting data on the client
- Sorting and filtering data
- Persisting data to the server
- Persisting a Unit of Work/changeset
- Working with concurrency and transactions
- Tracking a user's identity
- Controlling a user's access to a service and service methods
- Validating data using data annotations
- Validating data using shared code
- Using the DomainDataSource
- Using the DomainDataSource to page through data
- Sorting, filtering, and grouping data using the DomainDataSource
-
10. Converting Your Existing Applications to Use Silverlight
- Introduction
- Calling a stored procedure from Silverlight
- Working with LINQ to SQL from Silverlight
- Working with the Entity Framework from Silverlight
- Converting a Silverlight application to use WCF RIA Services
- Using ASP.NET Authentication in Silverlight
- Using ASP.NET Roles in Silverlight
- Using ASP.NET Profiles in Silverlight
- A. Appendix
- Index
Product information
- Title: Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook
- Author(s):
- Release date: April 2010
- Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
- ISBN: 9781847199843
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