About This Book
This is not a book simply about Silverlight as a technology, and it isn't about covering Silverlight from end to end. Silverlight features such as streaming video, Deep Zoom, 3D graphics, animations, sounds, and others that are not generally core requirements in business applications will not be covered. This book specifically targets the needs of those designing and developing business applications using Silverlight as a development platform. That said, you may be well versed in the process of business application design and merely be interested in how to apply your knowledge to developing business applications in Silverlight—this book caters to you too. You may even pick up a few new design tidbits as you go!
You may have noticed that many books, web articles, and presentations take a rather simplistic view when discussing building business applications in Silverlight, and these techniques rarely hold up to scrutiny in real-world projects. Instead of just giving you all the pieces and leaving you to fit them together yourself, this book is designed to act as your guide when creating your own business application, leading you through the difficult problems you will encounter and providing one or more solutions for each problem. Business applications involve more than simply retrieving some data and displaying it on the screen—this book will allow you to peer into all the nooks and crevices that represent good business and application design practices.
This book is designed to be read from start to end rather than simply being a reference guide. It will lead you through the process of creating an end-to-end Silverlight business application. Note that some of the Silverlight-specific lessons in early chapters are not designed to be put into immediate use, as they won't necessarily reflect all the recommended development practices in real-world projects, but are provided merely as a means of easing you into the world of Silverlight development.
Note For example, the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) design pattern commonly used in Silverlight and WPF business application development is not covered until the second half of this book. You will generally want to use this pattern in your applications, but the early chapters forgo this pattern in their examples, as implementing it requires a wide array of Silverlight knowledge that you will not have gained as yet. Despite its later position in this book, incorporating this design pattern into your project should not be an afterthought. Therefore, this book should not be considered a step-by-step guide, but an all-encompassing guide to all the concepts important to building business applications in Silverlight.
After completing this book, you will have gained the knowledge that you need for designing robust business applications and how to implement these techniques with a Silverlight-based project. While it would be impossible to cover each and every concept that could be employed when designing and developing business applications, this book will cover those that are the most important for developing a well-structured business application.
Unfortunately, exploring the complete myriad of scenarios that you may encounter in your application requirements simply isn't possible, nor is it possible to cover every possible solution to a problem. For example, due to the wide array of means for a Silverlight application to communicate with a server, covering them all and doing them justice would be impossible. For this reason, I chose to cover one technology in depth. For most end-to-end business applications in Silverlight (which is the primary focus of this book), RIA Services is your best option for handling communication between the Silverlight client and the server; therefore, this book will primarily focus on using that technology as the framework for this task.
Note If you decide RIA Services is not suitable for your needs, don't despair—the functionality covered in this book is not solely dependent on RIA Services, and there will still be large amounts of information useful to your project. We will take a brief look at creating and consuming plain WCF too.
You won't need to use every concept taught in this book in your own applications, because at times, some concepts may be excessive (depending on the size and type of project you are working on) or inappropriate. These concepts will be noted with the scenarios that they are most suitable for to help you make an informed choice.