Professional Silverlight 2 for ASP.NET Developers

by Jonathan Swift; Salvador Alvarez Patuel; Chris Barker (University College London, UK); Dan Wahlin

• ISBN13: 9780470478172
• ISBN10: 0470478179
• Format: eBook
• Copyright: 2009-04-01
• Publisher: Wrox

Summary

Our overarching goal in writing this book was to give ASP.NET developers the power to quickly and easily create visually stunning Internet applications, coupled with rich interactivity to fully immerse the user in a new online experience. Silverlight gives you everything you need to do just this, and in serious style!As well as taking you through each feature that ships with Silverlight, this book will make sure yours"re able to debug, troubleshoot, and performance-tune your Silverlight applications, as well as seamlessly hook into your existing ASP.NET architecture and code base.This book is aimed at .NET developers and architects who want to quickly get up to speed with all that Silverlight 2 has to offer.As well as covering the breadth of features that Silverlight 2 provides, this book makes a point of demonstrating where necessary how the particular feature can be integrated tightly with the ASP.NET host application. An example is in Chapter 7, where the ASP.NET Profile service is utilized directly from within Silverlight to obtain user-specific data.Itrs"s fair to say that although this book is aimed at ASP.NET developers, it covers all of the salient features of Silverlight 2 to the degree that itrs"s a useful programming resource for developers not using ASP.NET also.If yours"re fresh to .NET development, however, you might want to check out a beginning .NET book first, to help you overcome the syntax and set-up queries when learning a new language. Otherwise, take a deep breath and dive in!This book covers the full feature set of Silverlight 2, diving into each of the subject areas to give depth and breadth coverage. As well as teaching you about the component parts of the Silverlight API, the book also covers debugging, troubleshooting, and performance-tuning your Silverlight applications, arming you with all the skills and knowledge yours"ll need to create advanced Silverlight-based applications in record time.Importantly, this book covers the integration points between ASP.NET and Silverlight, taking you through the different techniques you can use to seamlessly augment your existing or new ASP.NET web sites with the power of Silverlight.If you want to program in Silverlight and potentially use ASP.NET as the host, then this book covers it all.The book is split into two distinct parts. Part I is titled "Silverlight Fundamentals for ASP.NET Developers," and Part II is titled "Developing ASP.NET Applications with Silverlight." Part I is intended to give you grounding in what Silverlight is as a technology and how it fits into the Web-based landscape. The component pieces of a Silverlight application are also laid out at a high level, and any knowledge required before putting an application together is explained.Part II is written to give you depth of knowledge across the Silverlight feature-set and show you how to leverage the power of both Silverlight and ASP.NET to create compelling applications.A brief synopsis of the content follows:"Silverlight in a Nutshell"-This will teach you at a high level what Silverlight is and how it can help you deliver engaging, immersive web applications. Differentiating Silverlight from other Web-based technologies is also covered here, and a description of the required development environment is provided. In short, after reading this, yours"ll be able to describe Silverlight and explain why yours"d want to use it and what gives it the edge over the competition."Silverlight Architecture"-Silverlight allows you to rapidly build a well-rounded application with a great user interface, but if you encounter any problems during development, it is going to be important for you to understand the underlying architecture upon which you are developing. This outlines the core features of Silve

Table of Contents

Introduction

Silverlight Fundamentals for ASP.NET Developers

Silverlight in a Nutshell

Uphill Struggle

Rich Client or Web Reach?

Silverlight Steps In

The Impact of Silverlight on Your Existing ASP.NET Real Estate

What You Should Still Do in ASP.NET

The Development Environment Overview

Summary

Silverlight Architecture

Client/Server Architecture Overview

Platforms

Architecture

ASP.NET Integration

Application Life Cycle

Summary

XAML Condensed

Why All ASP.NET Developers Should Know the Basics

XAML Syntax and Terminology

Piecing It All Together

Summary

Programming Silverlight

How a Silverlight Application Is Composed

JavaScript - How Much You Need to Know

JavaScript - The Basics

The Silverlight Object Model

Events, Threading, and Browser Interaction

Developing ASP.NET Applications with Silverlight

Creating the User Interface

Expression Suite - A Whirlwind Tour

ASP.NET versus Silverlight Layout

Summary

Silverlight Controls

Introduction to Silverlight Controls

Media Controls

Silverlight Toolkit Controls

Summary

Styles and Templates

Styles

Templating

Integrating with ASP.NET

ImplicitStyleManager

Summary

User Interaction

The Silverlight Interaction Context

Navigation

Summary

Communicating with the ServerSilverlight Networking and Communication Features

Cross-Domain Support

Creating Services for Silverlight

Calling Services with Silverlight

Calling REST APIsSummary

Working with Data

Data Framework

Data-Binding Essentials

Retrieving and Storing Data

Data Controls

Manipulating Data

LINQ

LINQ to XML

Validation

Summary

Creating Custom Controls

User Controls

Customizing Current Controls

Custom Controls

Summary

Securing Your Silverlight Application

You're under Attack!

The Security Model

Working in a Sandbox

Cross-Domain Security

Integrating with ASP.NET Security

Obfuscation

Cryptography

Summary

Audio and Video

First Steps

Finer Control

Summary

Graphics and Animation

Breathing Life into ASP.NET

Graphics in Silverlight

Image Handling

Animating Your User Interface

Summary

Troubleshooting

Is There a Problem?

Common Types of Problems

Your Toolkit

Reducing the Likelihood of Problems

Summary

Performance

Performance Bottlenecks

Instrumentation

Improving Performance

Summary

Index

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