QuickStarts

1. Introduction

In previous articles I showed how the most famous composite design patterns (Model – View – Controller and Model – View – Presenter) can be used with great success in Silverlight despite of the different programming model in Silverlight. My latest article targets a completely new pattern which has been created especially for WPF, but it is also very suitable for Silverlight applications. Today I’ve decided to continue my series of articles with OOP approach and to present you the main design patterns and practices used in the Composite Application Library (CAL).

Introduction

By now we have discussed the preparations around the project, how to add a DomainService that contains our business logic and combine it with the entity framework. If you have missed one of the previous articles you can find them here:

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

As you know from the previous articles in order to demonstrate the features of the .NET RIA Services I am creating the Web Administration Tool from ASP.NET in Silverlight. In this article I am going to create the Manage Users page and add the functionality needed to visualize Data. For that purpose I will need the DataGrid control, the new DataPager control and the DomainDataSource that is a part of the .NET RIA Services framework.

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

Introduction

With the beta release of Silverlight 3 a lot of new goodies were introduced and one of them was the navigation framework and in the final release additional features were added. It allows us to easily implement navigation between the newly introduced Page controls in a Silverlight application, interacts with the Browser History journal and provides us with Uri mapping. To learn more about these features read on the article.

For this article the demo will be the Mini SilverlightShow application, which I used not a long time ago as a demo to my article about the Telerik's RadPageNavigation control.

Introduction

In Part 6 of this series I looked at implementing a means for displaying reports that appear to be within the application and permitting them to be printed. In each of the articles so far I have discussed major components of line of business application development, but have spent little or no time in styling the application in anticipation of writing an article dedicated to doing so. However that article has turned into seven articles which will become a mini-series within this existing series.

Introduction

Animation Easing are built in animation functions in Silverlight 3. They include several commonly used animations effects.

Overview

I'll describe in details how you can use the BackEase animation. Imagine that you want to move an Ellipse from the top to the bottom of a Canvas. You just create a Storyboard with DoubleAnimation as follows:

Code behind:

OK, but what if you want to make the ellipse move up for a while and after that move down.

Introduction

The SaveFileDialog is a new dialog control in Silverlight 3 which allows the user to save a file on the client machine.

Overview

To demonstrate the common use of the SaveFileDialog I’ll give an example:

When you click on the button a dialog window appears which allows you to save a file.

Introduction

This article continues the series of articles about the .NET RIA Services framework and Silverlight 3. The scope of it is the DomainService class, which is used to create the business logic of the application and how it combines with the ADO.NET Data Model and the Enitity framework.

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

Here are links to the previous parts of the series:

Creating applications with .NET RIA Service  Part 1 - Introduction

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

Introduction

With the help of the .NET RIA Services framework we are now capable of creating business applications in Silverlight easy and fast. But before starting we should download and install the latest versions of Silverlight 3 and .NET RIA Services. In this article you'll find the needed links and a brief walkthrough of creating the project for our first Silverlight application using the .NET RIA Services Framework, as well as some highlights and explanations about the created project.

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

Here is a link to the first part of the series:

Creating applications with .NET RIA Service  Part 1 - Introduction

.NET RIA Services and Silverlight 3

Before beginning to code your first application, you have to download and install the Silverlight 3 Tools for Visual Studio, which contain the tools, the runtime and the SDK.

Several months ago the guys from Microsoft announced that they are developing a framework for developing Business applications under Silverlight with the codename Alexandria and now it's a reality! On the MIX'09 session a release of it under the name .NET RIA Services was announced.  The possibilities that the framework are really great and allow the Silverlight developers to easily develop business application in a much easier and faster way.

I am starting this series of articles in order to introduce the main features of the .NET RIA Services framework.

Introduction

A cool new feature in Silverlight 3 is the ability to run Silverlight applications out of the browser which resembles a desktop application. Only a few configuration steps are needed to enable your application to run offline.

See also:
Tip: Detecting Network Change in Silverllight 3 Application

Overview

To enable this feature you only need to open the AppManifest.xml file which can be found in the Properties folder and add
some settings as follows: