Tutorials

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.

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! ;)

Introduction

Yes, I was searching for months if there is any possibility to simple justify block text! And I didn’t find anything – except lots of posts like: “Why didn’t they implement it?”!

So I waited for Silverlight 3 Beta 1 to appear, and I began to hope and pray, but: Once again – there was nothing like block text. I was very disappointed. How should I display long text on the screen without clear formatting borders on both sides - and I don’t want to mix Silverlight and HTML again, either. I need this for building a web application composed of 100% Silverlight, and I don’t feel like doing the text-rendering and position-calculation by myself.

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

Silverlight 3 beta is out and it introduces a great variety of new functionality. Tim Heuer has already published a guide to the new features in Silverlight 3.

Element effects in Silverlight 2 are missing. This means that if you want to make your elements more attractive, you have to write your own effects. Silverlight.FX introduced a great number of effects and animations, which you can use. Nikhil Kothari has written a number of posts to show you the capabilities of this small but powerful framework.

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.