SilverlightTM 4 Problem — Design — Solution

Chapter 8. Unfinished Business

Finishing up the Dashboard Page

With all of the data entry pages complete, it's time to turn your attention back to the dashboard page that greets users who have logged into the application. At this point, after logging into the application, users are presented with a dashboard page that contains several summary controls that currently have no functionality behind them. Sure, the site announcements are working, but the rest of the page offers nothing to the users.

You could make the argument that these summary pages should have been completed during the original dashboard implementation, but I felt that until you had created pages that actually allowed you to create log entries it would be difficult to actually put any real functionality behind the controls. This chapter walks you through the creation of each of the summary controls and finishes up by taking the screenshot for the main page of the site, which is still blank. In this chapter, you will see how to expose custom types from the WCF RIA Services platform even if they have not been generated with the LINQ to SQL code generator. You will also see coverage of some important additions to Silverlight such as the new charting capabilities that can be found in the Silverlight Toolkit.

Finally, because the title of this chapter is "Unfinished Business" you'll be adding an important line-of-business feature to the log pages — Printing. Since Silverlight's first release, there's been no feature more ...