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This e-book collects all 4 parts of the series Working with Prism 4, together with source code.


From the author: Prism has a number of specific feature sets that I will explore in this series that helps you to build your client application as a composite application. These include:

• Modularity – Functionality to define and dynamically load chunks of loosely coupled functionality into a single running application instance.
• UI Composition – Functionality to plug in views into parent containers in a loosely coupled fashion where the parent and child do not need to know explicitly about one another with direct object references.
• Communications – Functionality to support loosely coupled commands and pub/sub events between the components of your application.
• Navigation – Functionality to switch views when the user interacts with the application within a container without every view and parent view needing to know about all the others.

An important thing to understand about Prism is that it is not an all-or-nothing framework. You can use any one or several of the features in isolation and ignore the other parts if they do not make sense for your application or your requirements. In addition to these major features, there are many small little helper classes and utilities in Prism that can be used on their own as well.

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This e-book collects the three parts of SilverlightShow article series 'Caching of, in, and around your Silverlight application', together with source code.

Let’s start with a general definition of caching: this is what Wikipedia has to say about this technique:

In computer science, a cache is a component that improves performance by transparently storing data such that future requests for that data can be served faster. ... (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caching)

Well, that sure opens up a lot of possible places to cache, in and outside of your Silverlight application. Can you cache the complete Silverlight application? What’s this assembly caching you keep on reading about? How do you go about keeping your data on the client when navigating to different parts of you application, instead of refetching it all the time? Can you leverage the Isolated Storage for caching, and is it possible to persist data in between different application sessions? Is it possible to share cached items between different Silverlight applications? And what about the server-side: can I minimize database hits when launching queries from my Silverlight application?

If you’ve ever asked yourself one (or more) of these questions, this e-book is for you. As you might notice when seeing them in the same paragraph, these questions are about different ways of caching, and they all apply to different scenarios.

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This e-book collects all 3 parts of the series 'The Duplex Story: Looking at Duplex Communication in Silverlight', together with source code.

Silverlight offers us many choices to work with services to get data into our applications. Supported technologies include WCF, ASMX, REST, WCF RIA Services etc. Through the use of any of these, it’s quite easy to get data from the server to the client application and vice versa. They all have one thing in common: before the data is sent, the client has to perform a request to the server to do so. The communication is known to be client-initiated.

But what if the server wants to initiate communication by sending some data to the client, without there being a request first? In this case, we need to use duplex communication, so that both sides of the communication channel can start sending data.

In this 3 chapter e-book, we’ll look at the options that Silverlight has on board to perform duplex communication. Inside each chapter you may find a link to the source code used throughout the chapter examples. All source codes are available with this e-book package.

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This e-book collects the 2 parts of Walter Ferrari's SilverlightShow article series Discover Sharepoint with Silverlight together with source code.

In this article series Walter Ferrari goes in-depth through the concepts of interacting with Sharepoint objects inside a Silverlight application. He explains how you can steer Sharepoint by using the Silverlight Client Object Model.

He does that by creating an application that can navigate through the hierarchy of the objects exposed by Sharepoint and shows its properties. Through this e-book you will explore, and in a certain way discover Sharepoint using a sort of Silverlight navigator. This would be a good opportunity to learn something on the Sharepoint framework and, at the same time, to become familiar with the Silverlight Client Object Model.

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This e-book collects the 2 parts of SilverlightShow article series 'Silverlight WCF RIA Services: Strategies for handling your Domain Context', together with source code.

A lot of business applications that are being developed in Silverlight today are built with the help of WCF RIA Services. This should come as no surprise, as it’s a really powerful, extensible framework which provides us with a lot of features out of the box (validation, authentication, authorization, …) that otherwise would require quite a lot of custom code, workarounds & plumbing. In WCF RIA Services, you’re going to be working with a client-side Domain Context instance. This e-book will look into a few strategies on working with this Domain Context, and is accompanied by a demo & source code, available in the downloadable package.

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This e-book collects the 2 parts of SilverlightShow article series 'Silverlight in the Azure Cloud' together with source code.

From the author: Cloud computing is a hot topic nowadays. The ability to have access to an unlimited amount of resources when we need it is awesome and can help us deliver better and more stable applications, while keeping the cost low. Many vendors, including Microsoft, Amazon and Google have their own cloud implementations.

Since PDC 2008, Microsoft jumped on the cloud-computing bandwagon and introduced Windows Azure. Microsoft envisions the cloud as the future. There are many great advantages that come with cloud computing, including nearly unlimited scaling, high availability and low cost to get started, all offered by Azure. When combining the power, scalability and high availability of Azure with a rich client platform like Silverlight, we can create even more compelling experiences.

Silverlight works great with Azure and vice versa. From a professional point-of-view, I have for done a few migrations of existing Silverlight applications towards the Azure platform. Moreover, I know use Azure for delivering intermediate builds of my Silverlight projects to the customer, without all the hassle of attaining and installing a server, making it available outside the domain etc. With the tools I have at my disposal for Azure, I can deploy to the cloud in a snap and we only pay for the days the server is online.

This all inspired me to give a webinar on SilverlightShow titled Switching on the cloud for Silverlight, delivered on March 23 2011 and available for on-demand viewing here. While there’s a lot of information in the talk, this e-book will be an extra companion to the webinar. Or maybe you don’t have an hour to spend and just want to read about Silverlight and Azure, well in that case, this e-book will give you the information you need to get started.

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Listen up! Bestselling author Paul Thurrott whispers little know Windows Phone 7 tips, tricks, and advice

The newly revamped Windows Phone platform boasts sophisticated new features and functionality. Sharing his years of training and experience, bestselling author and Windows expert Paul Thurrott reveals little known tips, valuable insight, and unbeatable advice so you can get the most from your Windows Phone 7. You’ll benefit from the simple, straightforward solutions to common problems, all of which will go a long way to help if you are new to the Window Phone 7.

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This book, while initially marketed at those iPhone developers seeking to adapt their iPhone skills to the world of Silverlight and WP7, is for any developer looking to build WP7 applications. This includes people who have never written a mobile application before as well as those of you looking to build the same application for both iPhone and WP7 platforms and share as much code as possible.

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Create the next generation of gaming titles for Windows Phone 7!

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WPF and Silverlight are unlike any other user interface (UI) technologies. They have been built to a new paradigm that—if harnessed correctly—can yield unprecedented power and performance. This book shows you how to control that power to produce clean, testable, maintainable code.

It is now recognized that any non-trivial WPF or Silverlight application needs be designed around the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) design pattern in order to unlock the technology's full data-binding potential. 

However, the knowledge of how to do this is missing from a large part of the development community—even amongst those who work with WPF and Silverlight on a daily basis. Too often there is a reliance on programmatic interaction between controls and not enough trust in the technologies' data-binding capabilities. This leads to a clouding of design values and an inevitable loss of performance, scalability, and maintainability throughout the application.

Pro WPF and Silverlight MVVM will show you how to arrange your application so that it can grow as much as required in any direction without danger of collapse.

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