Product Description

This e-book collects the 8 parts of SilverlightShow article series 'Windows 8 Apps - The 8 Must-Know Tricks'.

From the author:

One of the promises of Windows 8 is to be the next iteration of the most popular computer OS. Be excited, as this is the biggest & boldest change in Windows since 95 and there is a lot in it for developers. If you are a .NET developer, the programming paradigms in Windows 8 Metro apps should be very interesting, with fragments of it boiling over to other .NET development. XAML devs should feel right at home, as should web folks with strong HTML/JS/CSS skills. Metro apps are fun to write, in my opinion, and there is a huge potential to make a name for yourself when the Windows Store opens with Windows 8.

I have had the superb pleasure of working on several Windows 8 Enterprise LOB Metro apps for proof-of-concept, along with some very talented internal developers/designers. Unfortunately, that also means NDA and not being able to talk about stuff yet. But what I can do is share some coding experiences, since there is a decent learning curve. I will try to keep the articles short for readability & jump into what you need to make your first Windows 8 Metro app.

So, here is a series on common tips & tricks towards developing real-world Windows 8 Metro apps. We'll talk about some must-do things for Windows 8 Metro app developers. Simple, to the point, with some code examples on XAML/C# stack.

Buy from:

Product Description

This ebook collects the 7 parts of SilverlightShow article series 'Windows 8 and the Future of XAML', together with source code.

From the author: It’s my goal in this series to introduce you to what we know at this point about Windows 8 and how we as (XAML) developers will need to adapt to the new platform.

Since you’re probably a XAML developer like I am, we are going to see things from a XAML point-of-view. In some of the upcoming articles, I’m going to describe you how you can leverage what you already know in XAML when Windows 8 will be ready. I’m also going to spend time looking at how you can convert existing Silverlight applications to Windows 8 Metro apps, so that they follow the rules of the OS. We will also be spending time of course on digging into the developer framework making the development on Windows 8 easy: Windows Runtime or shorter, WinRT.

About the author:

Gill Cleeren is Microsoft Regional Director (www.theregion.com), Silverlight MVP (former ASP.NET MVP) and Telerik MVP. He lives in Belgium where he works as .NET architect at Ordina (http://www.ordina.be/). Passionate about .NET, he’s always playing with the newest bits. In his role as Regional Director, Gill has given many sessions, webcasts and trainings on new as well as existing technologies, such as Silverlight, ASP.NET and WPF at conferences including TechEd Berlin 2010, TechDays Belgium – Switzerland - Sweden, DevDays NL, NDC Oslo Norway, SQL Server Saturday Switzerland, Spring Conference UK, Silverlight Roadshow in Sweden, Telerik RoadShow UK… He’s also the author of many articles in various developer magazines and for SilverlightShow.net and he organizes the yearly Community Day event in Belgium. He also leads Visug (www.visug.be), the largest .NET user group in Belgium. Gill is the author of “Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook”. In 2012, the second edition, “Silverlight 5 Data and Services Cookbook” was released.

You can find his blog at www.snowball.be. Twitter: @gillcleeren

Buy from:

Product Description

This ebook collects the first 7 parts of SilverlightShow article series 'Windows 8 Metro', together with source code.

In this first part (2 more parts expected to be released, following the development of the series) Andrea introduces the basic concepts of Windows 8 development, and covers developing your first application, the application life-cycle, the new metro controls and more. 

From the author: In the recent days an epocal change is becoming evident. If you tried to download the new Windows 8 Consumer Preview, available for free on Microsoft website, you know what I mean. The change, that is greatly focused on a new user experience, is driven by the growing power of portable devices that are becoming prevalent on common desktop and laptops. Up to the day before today, tablet PCs, smartphones, and generically speaking touch-enabled devices was expensive and not effective, but they are now something that common people start to take in serious consideration from the effectiveness perspective and also from the economical point of view.

As said, this change is mostly focused on a new user experience due to the fact that there is a shift of the attention from the business software to the consumer market. Never like today the wide availability of consumer application have been important and this, joined with the new touch paradigm requires a completely new set of rules to design the experience and the interaction of the user with your software.

In this series I aim to share my evolving experience with the new Windows 8 Metro Applications. As few people knows I have a graphical background that lives side by side with my programmer soul. During this series I would like to discover most of the wonderful tools behind Metro applications. 

About the author:Andrea Boschin is a Silverlight MVP from Italy who currently lives and works in Treviso, a beautiful town near Venice. He started to work in the IT relatively late after doing some various jobs like graphic designer and school teacher. Finally he started to work into the web and learned by himself to program in VB and ASP and later in C# and ASP.NET. Since the start of his work, Andrea found he likes to learn new technologies and take them into the real world. This happened with ASP.NET, the source of his first two MVP awards, and recently with Silverlight, that he started to use from the v1.0 in some real projects. 
 
Andrea blogs at http://silverlightplayground.org/ and tweets from @aboschin.

Buy from:

Product Description

This e-book collects the 4 parts of SilverlightShow article series 'Creating the SilverlightShow Windows Phone Application' authored by Peter Kuhn.

From the author: At the end of February, the official SilverlightShow Windows Phone app has been accepted into the Marketplace. The app gives you access to some of the content of this website, including news, articles and events, and is completely free for use (also ad-free!). Some of the convenience features include the possibility to create reminders for upcoming events and webinars directly on your phone, to get notifications about new content in the form of live tiles, and to maintain a local list of favorites that allows you to permanently store items for later reading. If you haven’t checked out the app yet, you can find more details and a quick intro video here, or visit its Marketplace page here.

The creation of the app was an interesting experience, because unlike other phone projects I had worked on in the past, this one wasn’t a greenfield development. Obviously the SilverlightShow portal already existed, had a long-established production infrastructure and already a lot of existing content available.

Buy from:

Product Description

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.

Buy from:

This ebook collects all 8 parts of SilverlightShow article series 'Windows Phone 7.5', together with source code.

In these eight chapters Andrea Boschin explores key concepts of Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango), illustrating each of them with examples, and full source code for the demos. You will find a number of options to simplify development tasks on Windows Phone 7.5, as well as add interesting features.

Buy from:

Product Description

This e-book collects all 3 parts of SilverlightShow article series on using OData and Azure in Windows Phone, together with source code.

From the author: 

Windows Azure & Windows Phone seem to be two very popular technologies out of Redmond right now.

There is obviously a lot of buzz around cloud infrastructure involving Azure solutions and the wonderful developer story that we have for Windows Phone development. But, should these two platforms work together & if so, can they? How can you as a Mobile/Windows Phone developer utilize the cloud?

In the first chapter, we talk about how to leverage Windows Azure to supplement our Windows Phone application. In particular, we will see how SQL Azure can be rather beneficial in providing globally accessible & scalable backend for mobile solutions on Windows Phone & other disparate platforms. The key link we shall leverage is OData Services for providing cross-platform read/write access to a central data repository... 

Buy from:

Product Description

This ebook collects the first 3 parts of Walter Ferrari's SilverlightShow article series Silverlight and SharePoint Working Together. More parts coming soon. All customers receive an updated ebook copy within one day from a new chapter release.

From the author: With this I am starting out a series focused on finding the best way to have these two technologies (Sharepoint and Silverlight) working together. In this ebook we will explore some possible ways to make Silverlight work with some of the features of Sharepoint including the less known ones.
What we'll cover in this ebook:

• Cover the three techniques to Silverlight in Sharepoint. Recently Microsoft came out with a Visual Studio extension to facilitate this process, details here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/pstubbs/archive/2011/04/04/add-silverlight-web-parts-to-sharepoint-using-new-visual-studio-extension.aspx 
• Interaction between Sharepoint sites and Windows Phone 7: what is at disposal out of the box, what are the issues, how to build applications that take advantage from both the platforms etc
• Sharepoint has a feature called "quick launch menu" which is a pre-build navigation system; the series will explain how to build a Silverlight menu which uses the same enigne of the "quick launch menu"
• Experimenting Sharepoint with Silverlight 5 especially with regard to OOB apps

Buy from:

Product Description

This ebook collects the two parts of SilverlightShow article series Authorization in Silverlight, together with source code.

From the author: As we know, Silverlight is very capable platform for building Line of Business applications today, both in and out of the browser. It’s come to the point that – at least in my experience – a lot of desktop applications are now built with Silverlight instead of WinForms, skipping over WPF completely.

With that in mind, it’s pretty weird that there’s an essential part that seems to be missing: authentication & authorization. When you look at the Silverlight Core CLR, there’s not much there concerning this – although it’s a no-brainer for business and enterprise applications: you need to make sure certain parts of your application are only available to users that are authenticated or have a specific role. Sure, you can use the hosting web page & ASP .NET authentication to ensure only authenticated persons can reach your Silverlight application, but there’s no out of the box way to enable or block a user from navigating to a specific view in your application.

Luckily, it only requires a little bit of coding and all in all: it’s quite easy to enable authenticated & authorized navigation in your Silverlight applications, mainly thanks to the introduction of a new class in Silverlight 4: the custom content loader.

In this ebook, we’ll look into enabling scenarios to enable/disable certain parts of your application for authenticated users, and to automatically ask the user for his credentials if he’s trying to access a part of the application that requires him to be authenticated or to have a specific role.

Buy from:

Product Description

This e-book is based on SilverlightShow 8-part article series 'Developing Real-world Applications with LightSwitch’.

From the author:

In 2010, Microsoft announced LightSwitch, a product aimed at developing Line-of-Business applications with ease. In July 2011, the beta tag was finally removed from the product as Microsoft officially introduced Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 as a new member of the Visual Studio family. Many however are still unsure about the product. Questions crossing a lot of minds include “Is it something for me?”, “What can I do with it?”, “Where should I use it?”, “Is it more than Microsoft Access?”, “Am I limited to what’s in the box?” and quite a few more.

For this reason, I have decided that a few articles should be in place to give you a clear understanding of LightSwitch. I won’t be saying that you should LightSwitch for this or that. Using a sample application we will build throughout the series, I will try giving you an overview of how we can use it to build a real-world application. By reading these articles, I hope you’ll be able to make up your mind whether or not LightSwitch is something for you.

Buy from: