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Introduction

These series of posts will help you when creating rich data forms with Silverlight 3 in your projects. Silverlight 3 introduces a new control, called DataForm. It enables various methods for display, edit, update and navigation through data. I my previous two articles I gave you a clear view of this new cool control. I showed you how easily you can bind an object or a collection of objects to a DataForm control and the whole bunch of stuff you can do with every data source.

Authentication and authorization plays a key role in the web world. Going distributed makes information sharing healthier. But only if it's allowed for the know contact it will be healthy. We can very well see this in the existing web world. We have the memberships and roles for ASP.Net web applications. In addition we also have forms authentication and NTLM authentication.

Going smart client is always best. But considering security it has to be more secure since smart clients attract all the people they can be easily prey to security vulnerabilities.

Introduction

These series of posts will help you when creating rich data forms with Silverlight 3 in your projects. Silverlight 3 introduces a new control, called DataForm. It enables various methods for display, edit, update and navigation through data. In my previous article I gave you a clear view of this new cool control. I showed you how easily you can bind an object or a collection of objects to a DataForm control and the whole bunch of stuff you can do with every data source.

In this article I will show you how you can style your control.

1. Introduction

In the previous parts of the article I showed you the first two groups of patterns used in the Composite Application Library (CAL) – Composite User Interface patterns and Modularity patterns. In the final part I will show you the third group – Testability patterns.

2. Patterns and Practices in the CAL - quick overview

As a whole the patterns used in CAL can be separated in three main groups:

• Composite User Interface patterns (part 1)
  • Composite
  • Composite View
  • Command
  • Adapter
• Modularity patterns (part 2)
  • Separated interface and Plug In
  • Service Locator
  • Dependency Injection
  • Event Aggregator
  • Façade
  • Registry
• Testability patterns (part 3)
  • Inversion of control
  • Separated presentation

3.

Silverligth 3 is the most awaited release of Microsoft. I found the download’s from the page Silverlight 3. The following are the utlities that can be found in this download page.

1. Silverlight 3 Beta Tools for Visual Studio
2. Microsoft Expression Blend 3 Preview
3. Silverlight Toolkit
4. .NET RIA Services
5. Silverlight 3 Beta Documentation

In this list the most attracting one is the RIA services which is making wonders with Silverlight now. I will be discussing about them in the later posts.

Introduction

Silverlight 2 has introduced many interesting features and controls but it misses something that Silverlight 3 makes possible –easily creating and manipulating rich data forms. These series of posts will help you when creating rich data forms in Silverlight 3 in your projects. Silverlight 3 introduces a new control, called DataForm. It enables various methods for display, edit, update and navigation through data.

The DataForm control is like the DataGrid control in Silverlight 2. But while the DataGrid control is used to manipulate a list of items, the DataForm control focuses on the item itself.

1. Introduction

In the previous part of the article I showed the first part of most important patterns and practices used in the Composite Application Library (CAL). In the second part I will show you the second group – the Modularity patterns.

2. Patterns and Practices in the CAL - quick overview

As a whole the patterns used in CAL can be separated in three main groups:

• Composite User Interface patterns (part 1)
  • Composite
  • Composite View
  • Command
  • Adapter
• Modularity patterns (part 2)
  • Separated interface and Plug In
  • Service Locator
  • Dependency Injection
  • Event Aggregator
  • Façade
  • Registry
• Testability patterns (part 3)
  • Inversion of control
  • Separated presentation

3.

Introduction

In Part 7.1 of this series I looked at the importance of styling your Silverlight applications. In this article I will be taking a look at fashions in user interface design of late, and what basic elements can be identified as working towards beautiful and functional applications. Also I will address some of the “controversy” from my previous article and provide some opinions and responses to the comments I received.

Before we start, I have a disclaimer. I’m a developer, not a graphics designer – so I’m writing these styling articles from a developer’s perspective (and with the same limited graphical design skills many other developers share).

Introduction

In this previous article we added a DomainDataSource control in our application and bounded it to a DataGrid and with their help we easily visualized our data. Now we are going to implement some more goodies into the application - sorting and filtering. We achieve that via the DomainDataSource control, as it provides such functionality and is really simple to use.

Here are some links to the previous articles if you have missed them:

Creating applications with .NET RIA Services Part 1 - Introduction

Creating applications with .NET RIA Services Part 2 - Creating the project

Creating applications with .NET RIA Services Part 3 - Adding a DomainService class

Creating applications with .NET RIA Services Part 4 - Adding a DomainDataSource

Here is a link to the live demo at this stage and the source code. Note that they will be updated with each article! ;)