Product Description

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’ imaginat...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #248248 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 672 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780470277751
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From the Back Cover

Professional Silverlight 2 for ASP.NET Developers

If you want to quickly and easily create visually stunning Internet applications with rich interactivity, then this is the book for you. It covers the full feature set of Microsoft's Silverlight 2, showing you how to use it to build, debug, troubleshoot, and performance tune your robust applications. You'll also learn different techniques to seamlessly augment your ASP.NET web sites with the power of this plug-in.

You'll first discover what Silverlight is as a technology and how it fits into the web-based landscape. The component pieces of a Silverlight application are also explained at a higher level. You'll gain a strong understanding of its features and discover how to leverage both Silverlight and ASP.NET to create compelling applications.

With this book, you'll learn how to program in Silverlight and you can discover all the benefits of using ASP.NET as the host. It arms you with all the skills and knowledge you'll need to build advanced Silverlight-based applications in record time.

What you will learn from this book

• Steps for rapidly building a well-rounded application

• The different options for embedding the Silverlight plug-in

• How to create a scalable UI and localize your application

• Techniques for utilizing the different networking technologies

• Ways to customize the Silverlight 2 controls

• Tips for embedding high fidelity audio and video in your application

• How to work within a secure environment using the built-in security framework

• All about troubleshooting Silverlight applications to ensure performance

Who this book is for

This book is for .NET developers and architects who want to quickly get up to speed with all that Silverlight 2 has to offer.

Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.

About the Author
Jonathan Swift worked as an Application Development Consultant for Microsoft in the United Kingdom for a number of years and now finds himself managing the team. This means that he spends most of his time traveling around the country helping clients utilize Microsoft developer technologies effectively. Jonathan has been programming for more than 13 years and has worked with numerous technologies, including but not limited to C, C++, Visual Basic, COM, COM+, SQL, ASP, and, of course, all aspects of .NET. As well as programming, Jonathan also spent part of his career working as a Microsoft Trainer, delivering the full suite of Microsoft Official Curriculum courses and specially-designed courses also.

Jonathan tries to keep his blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/jonathanswift) up to date, but feels that writing a book is a very good excuse for not doing so. (Other popular excuses including playing the XBox and washing his hair.) When he’s not working, Jonathan spends all of his time with his wife and kids, and occasionally gets to exercise his pilot’s license at the flying club.

Chris Barker works as an Application Development Consultant for Microsoft in the United Kingdom (www.microsoft.com/uk/adc). He spends his days traveling around the country visiting customers and consulting on development practices on the Microsoft platform. More recently, his interest has been captured by RIA development, and as a result, he has delivered several customer workshops on Silverlight. Away from the office, Chris likes to get out and about in his home county of Derbyshire, riding a bike, kicking a football, and sinking a few pints of real ale.

Dan Wahlin (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for Connected Systems) is a .NET development instructor and architecture consultant at Interface Technical Training (www.interfacett.com). Dan founded the XML for ASP.NET Developers web site (www.xmlforasp.net), which focuses on using ASP.NET, Silverlight, AJAX, and XML Web Services in Microsoft’s .NET platform. He’s also on the INETA Speaker’s Bureau and speaks at several conferences. Dan has authored/co-authored numerous books over the years on .NET technologies with his latest being Professional ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX and Professional Silverlight 2 for ASP.NET Developers. Dan also writes for several online technical newsletters, blogs at http://weblogs.asp.net/dwahlin, and updates what he’s up to from time to time at www.twitter.com/danwahlin. When he’s not working with technology, he enjoys sports and writing and recording music to relax a little — http://weblogs.asp.net/dwahlin/archive/tags/ Music/default.aspx.

Salvador Alvarez Patuel has been in the industry for more than 13 years. Currently a senior application development consultant (ADC) at Microsoft, helping customers to architect and build complex solutions using Microsoft technologies in the United Kingdom. Salvador has also been delivering multiple technical sessions around EMEA on Windows Mobile development and has been answering questions on many ask-the-experts events. Before joining Microsoft, he was the main technical architect for real-time engines on popular auctions, TV channels, and the gaming industry. He holds a software engineering degree from his native Argentina and a specialization in artificial intelligence. When Salva is not thinking about ones and zeroes, he enjoys climbing, windsurfing, and recently trying to learn how to play golf.

Customer Reviews

Solid book with plenty of information
Don't be confused by the title of this book - it's 95% about Silverlight. I think its just one of those "publisher title formulas". Of course, most all Silverlight development is done by "ASP.NET" developers because you are using Visual Studio 2008 and an ASP.NET Web project to host the Silverlight control. And of course, Expression Blend will also load a Silverlight Visual Studio project to do your design work and XAML layout.

Jonathan Swift, Chris Barker, Dan Wahlin, and Salvador Patuel have put together a very well-designed, informative book on all major aspects of working with Silverlight 2. I am not familiar with all the authors, but I know Dan Wahlin pretty well and he's a real thinker. Dan is the one who, among other contributions, designed the WCF polling duplex game app.

The book starts out with the obligatory first chapter about Silverlight / history and so on. But from that point on it gets a lot better.

Chapter 2 provides a feature - complete description of Silverlight Architecture, what's "in" and what's "out", and XAML.

Chapter 3 is a condensed treatise on XAML and why you need to learn how to use it.

Chapter 4 gets into the actual programming model of Silverlight, how applications are composed, namespaces, pages, Javascript, DOM manipulation, the SL Object Model, Dynamic XAML, Events, Threading, Routed Events, BackgroundWorker, and a lot more.

Chapter 5 deals with Expression Suite and creating the User Interface. You get a whirlwind tour of the Expression family of products, the layout process, controls, full-screen support, localization via resources, and more.

Chapter 6 comprises a comprehensive treatment of all the Silverlight controls, including the new Toolkit controls. Forty five pages worth!

Chapter 7 provides coverage of Styles and Templates - inline styles, specifying styles, overriding styles, and templating along with VisualState and template binding.

Chapter 8 covers User Interaction - UIElements Events, consuming properties, input devices, storyboards, keyboard, ink, drag and drop, and navigation, with lots of great code samples, visuals and charts.

Chapter 9 gets into the area of communication- Networking, data processing, Cross-Domain support, policy files, WCF and ASMX services, service proxies, REST API's and services, processing XML data, JSON, serialization, sockets, feeds, and more.

Chapter 10 covers all the data framework options, LINQ, Data controls, data binding, complex binding and conversions, dependency properties, data repositories, Isolated Storage, ADO.NET Data Services and more.

Chapter 11 is devoted entirely to the creation of Custom Controls and control architecture.

Chapter 12 covers security - the Security Model, Cross - Domain Security, and integration with ASP.NET Security. It ends with some coverage of obfuscation.

Chapter 13 provides feature - complete coverage of audio and video in Silverlight.

Chapter 14 covers graphics and animation.

Chapter 15 explains troubleshooting and debugging techniques, along with testing and exception handling.

Chapter 16 provides about the best coverage I've seen on Game loops and performance considerations in developing Silverlight apps.

I was surprised at the level of depth this book goes into about Silverlight - even thought just released, it really wasn't on my radar until I asked Dan Wahlin about it. I'm not sure that the book has been properly promoted. But rest assured, I believe this book is "up there" in the top 4 or 5 books about Silverlight. It is very well written and orderly, loaded with excellent charts, graphics and source code examples (all in C# - along with downloadable Visual Studio solutions for almost all chapters), and it covers topics that other Silverlight books either skim over or do not cover at all. Definitely worth your while. The book lists for $49.95 and can of course be found at online discounters for less.

If your an Asp.Net developer wanting to learn Silverlight, get this book
Writing a programming book is extremely difficult. You generally either end up wallowing in a blancmange of technical details suitable only for egg-heads like me or you end up with a meringue, so light on details that your granny would understand every word.

Professional Silverlight 2 for ASP.Net developers is like a lemon sorbet fitting nicely in-between the two. Light enough to make for easy reading but with enough bite in the technical department that you walk away with a very good knowledge of actually how to do things. Wrox are known for their tombstone like manuals that are everything to everybody, desktop reference books. Over the years Wrox has went from being the absolute authority on programming (if you are old enough you will remember the Wrox book on classic Asp which was the bible for Asp programmers), to books that I honestly wouldn't expend the energy to lift up. Lately however Wrox have been retracing their steps back to the good old days and this book on Silverlight 2 is definitely a step along that path. It comes in lighter than most Wrox books at only a tad over 600 pages so you don't need professional weight bodybuilding classes just to lift it, but is packed with knowledge and information.

As you might guess from the title, this book is not for programming newbie's and expects that you have a good understanding of ASP.Net, it's page lifecycles, event models, and the underlying .Net Framework. This book was written squarely for Asp.Net developers who want to get to grips with Microsoft's new(ish) Silverlight component. Silverlight 1 was fairly limited in what you could do with it and your only programming choice was JavaScript. Silverlight 2 introduced a condensed .Net Framework and CLR and therefore opened up the programming realm to C# and VB.Net programmers.

After a brief introduction into the Silverlight world and how it is architected, you delve straight into the meaty aspects of Silverlights XAML model, a cut down version of the full client side XAML model and how to interact with the Silverlight objects in your code-behind. A chapter is dedicated on how to layout your Silverlight application detailing what controls are available to you and giving you tips and guidance on how to appropriately scale up for full-screen mode if you should decide to allow users to use this option. Next the book moves on to varied user controls that come pre-packaged with Silverlight 2, what they are, they're various properties and quirks and also refreshing to see is some details of controls in the Silverlight Toolkit, a separate download that adds further controls and functionality Silverlight.

Most Asp.Net developers are trying to produce standards based, best practice websites and they are a myriad of options on how to style objects and controls available within the Asp.Net framework from CSS to theming. Silverlight 2 also has these options available albeit slightly differently, there is no CSS as per se, but there is an equivalent. Chapter 7 of the book covers all of these in detail, except for one which I found odd. The book does cover best practices in separating content from styling but then does not proceed to it's natural conclusion in removing the styling from the actual page and into a separate resource file. This strangely comes much later in the book under the chapter of working with data and appears to be a bit of a disconnect. A fairly minor gripe as the author's do indeed cover the subject, along with best practices and explanations as to why.

Every application needs interaction and responding to what the user is doing, the next chapter covers just this and goes into sufficient detail that you not only know about events from the built in controls but the authors give you a good explanation of the actual event model should you decide at some point to build your own controls. It's certainly not an exhaustive view of the event model but certainly enough to get you started with your own controls. This is nicely rounded out with a chapter later in the book on precisely that, how to build your own controls.

The next major chunk of the book deals with communicating with the server and data. Silverlight 2 is a client application with your code-behind actually running client side and not server side like you are used to with the Asp.Net programming model, therefore getting data in and out of Silverlight is slightly different. The book details well all of the possible ways that this can be accomplished and the various ways of actually getting that data into your controls and onto your page. Special attention is paid to data binding which is done slightly differently in Silverlight than in Asp.Net.

When Silverlight 1 first appeared on the scene, most thought of it as the beauty queen of plugins, very pretty but not much substance. Silverlight 2 retains the looks of its' predecessor but adds some meat to the bones rounding out a very nice package. The next section deals with the blush and lipstick of Silverlight, what makes it different from it's main rival Flash, and how to take advantage of this added power and graphical wondrousness. Finally it rounds off with a few chapters on how to Troubleshoot Silverlight errors and your inevitable programming glitches and performance considerations that you should take into account with best practices on how to do this. Remember, Silverlight is a client application and therefore everything has to be sent to the client, but there are ways to do this so that your web page doesn't take an orbit of the sun to load.

This is the first Silverlight 2 book that I have read that really does take into account what knowledge you should have programming web pages in Asp.Net and transferring and molding that knowledge so that it is relevant to Silverlight. The authors have done a fantastic job and given you enough details that you can be confident to get good looking and fully immersive applications in Silverlight 2. If you are an Asp.Net developer who has a future project that will use Silverlight 2 or you just want to dip your big toe into the pond and make some waves then I thoroughly recommend this book.

Silverlight 2, More to Come
I was excited when I first opened the book. After reading it, and using the code examples I downloaded, I can say it's worth it! I am still going over the various chapters, I found Chapter 4 the most difficult. Unlike many "Learn To" do something books, the code worked nearly every time and by rereading I was able to learn what was presented. It's not "light" reading if you work out the code examples with the text, but it's understandable.
I would recommend this book as a first step to aspiring Asp.Net programmers, and it's in my favorite language, C#. Only short coming is I posted a question or 2 in the WROX support forum for this book, and after 2 weeks no response there. Worthwhile...