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Product Description

Silverlight 4 has the potential to revolutionize the way we build business applications. With its flexibility, web deployment, cross-platform capabilities, rich .NET language support on the client, rich user interface control set, small runtime, and more, it comes close to the perfect platform in which to build business applications. It’s a very powerful technology, and despite its youth, it’s moving forward at a rapid pace and is gaining widespread adoption.

This book will guide you through the process of designing and developing enterprise-strength business applications in Silverlight 4 and C#. You will learn how to take advantage of the power of Silverlight to develop rich and robust business applications, from getting started to deployment, and everything in between.

In particular, this book will serve developers who want to learn how to design business applications, and introduce the patterns to use, the issues that you’ll face, and how to resolve them. Chris Anderson, who has been building line-of-business applications for years, demonstrates his experience through a candid presentation of how to tackle real-life issues, rather than just avoid them. Developers will benefit from his hard-won expertise through business application design patterns that he shares throughout the book.

With this book in hand, you will

• Create a fully functional business application in Silverlight
• Discover how to satisfy all of the general requirements that most business applications need
• Develop a business application framework

What you’ll learn

• How to structure your project to ensure a robust and maintainable application
• How to create user interfaces with XAML and bind controls to data
• How to communicate securely between the server and the client
• How to view and maintain data within a Silverlight user interface
• How to design unique user experiences and use advanced styling techniques
• How to implement standard business application paradigms in Silverlight

Who is this book for?

This book is for developers experienced in other .NET technologies, such as WinForms or ASP.NET, looking to translate their existing skills to developing business applications with Silverlight. Patterns and methodologies associated with building robust applications will be introduced and are not prerequisite knowledge.

Table of Contents

1. Getting Started with Sliverlight
2. Designing User Interfaces with XAML
3. The Navigation Framework
4. Server/Client Communication using RIA Data Services
5. Summary Lists
6. Building Data Entry Forms
7. Securing Your Application
8. Styling Your Application
9. Advanced XAML and Data Binding
10. Creating Custom Controls
11. Complex User Interface Elements
12. Model View View-Model (MVVM) Architecture
13. Reporting and Printing
14. Test Driven Development, Dependency Injection, and Unit Testing
15. Data Caching, Local File Access, and COM
16. Application Deployment

About the Author

Chris Anderson has been a professional developer for over 10 years now, specializing in building desktop, web, and mobile business applications using Microsoft technologies for industries as wide ranging as accounting, property valuation, mining, the fresh produce industry, pet cremations, logistics, field services, sales, and construction. Now running his own business he has turned to Silverlight as the ideal new technology for developing and deploying business applications. Chris currently resides in Sydney, Australia.

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The Two Step View pattern, as its own name suggests, proposes a mechanism composed of two steps for generating an HTML page:first, a logical representation of the page is produced, as a map (key => value) of the different elements of the page.then, the physical representation is rendered, by juggling around the single elements to compose the final HTML.The first step is usually related to...

Hookbox (via). For most web projects, I believe implementing any real-time comet features on a separate stack from the rest of the application makes sense—keep using Rails, Django or PHP for the bulk of the application logic, and offload any WebSocket or Comet requests to a separate stack built on top of something like Node.js, Twisted, EventMachine or Jetty. Hookbox is the best example of that philosophy I’ve yet seen—it’s a Comet server that makes WebHook requests back to your regular application stack to check if a user has permission to publish or subscribe to a given channel. “The key insight is that all application development with hookbox happens either in JavaScript or in the native language of the web application itself”.

canto.js: An Improved HTML5 Canvas API (via). Improved is an understatement: canto adds jQuery-style method chaining, the ability to multiple coordinates to e.g. lineTo at once, relative coordinate methods (regular Canvas does everything in terms of absolute coordinates), the ability to use degrees instead of radians, a rounded corner shortcut, a more convenient .revert() method and a simple parser that can understand SVG path expressions! The only catch: it uses getters and setters so won’t work in IE.

Managing focus on input components with JSF can require quite some work since you need to write your own javascript that set focus on fields, know about clientIds and handle cases where validation fails. Also you need to do this for every page that has different set of component. In order to make focus management easier, I’ve added p:focus component to PrimeFaces which is a handy component that manages focus for you in various cases.

Default Focus

When focus is placed on a page, it finds the first visible editable input component and sets focus on it. This is simple as;

<p:focus />
<h:inputText disabled="true"/>
<h:inputText />

In this case second inputText will receive focus as first one is disabled.

Explicit Focus

You can also define a particular component to apply focus.

<p:focus for="text" />

<h:inputText id="text" />

Failed validations

This is where things get interesting, when validations fail focus knows about the first invalid field in component tree and sets focus on it. You just need to update focus component as well.

<p:focus id="focus" />

<p:panel header="New User" id="pnl">
    <h:panelGrid columns="2">
        <h:outputLabel for="firstname" value="Firstname: *" />
        <h:inputText id="firstname" required="true" />

        <h:outputLabel for="surname" value="Surname: *" />
        <h:inputText id="surname" required="true" />
    </h:panelGrid>
</p:panel>

<p:commandButton value="Submit" update="pnl focus" />

If required validations on firstname or surname fail, focus will applied on the first invalid component. So if firstname is valid and surname is invalid, surname will get focus. By default FacesMessages with Error severity are considered, this can be tuned with severity attribute of focus, so as an example you can choose to apply focus if message level is at least warning by setting severity to warn.

Focus Context
By default focus considers the all input fields in JSF page, if you like focus to work on a specific part of your page, use the context option. This is very handy in cases where you have a dialog open and want p:focus to consider the input fields in dialog only.

<p:focus id="focus" context="dialog"/>

<p:dialog header="New User" id="dialog">
    <h:panelGrid id="grid" columns="2">
        <h:outputLabel for="firstname" value="Firstname: *" />
        <h:inputText id="firstname" required="true" />

        <h:outputLabel for="surname" value="Surname: *" />
        <h:inputText id="surname" required="true" />
    </h:panelGrid>
</p:dialog>

<p:commandButton value="Submit" update="grid focus" />

In this case, input fields outside of the dialog are not considered.

Live Example
That’s it, in summary using p:focus, you can come up with a generic solution and save user from one extra click. If you’d like to see focus in action, check out the online showcase of PrimeFaces.

In this post, Jose Luis Latorre Millas discusses how to set the SelectedItem on the corresponding DataGrid property.

I have been developing a Silverlight business application and one of the problems I have found is the “inconsistency” of the DataGrid… at least of some of its behaviors, when I click on a row, I expect that the SelectedItem (the clicked one) is set on the corresponding DataGrid property.

But it does not. at least not “always”, lets be clear maybe I’m doing something wrong but this randomness on this behavior is driving me crazy, if I click on a Grid row, it should select it and mark the SelectedItem on the corresponding property, right? 

Tau Sick has created a multitasking stopwatch for Windows Phone 7.

In .NET Rocks! Show number 578 about the Silverlight Pivot Viewer, a listener writes in about the lack of multitasking in Windows Phone 7.

He points out that he often uses a stopwatch on Android and let it “run in the background” while doing other tasks.

This is a perfect example of something that is entirely possible on WP7 if you try to change your mindset and look at what’s possible instead of focusing on limitations.

Learn how to design your Windows Phone applications to take advantage of the accent color....( read more )...(read more)

In this article, Mahesh Sabnis demonstrates how to use the ‘IDataErrorInfo’ interface which is newly provided in Silverlight 4 under System.ComponentModel namepsace.

Silverlight 4.0 has several new features and it has been listed down well over here. One of the most exciting features of Silverlight 4.0, is its capability for building Line-of-Business (LOB) applications. Last week I was conducting a training program for one of my client on VS 2010, where I was asked lots of queries regarding Silverlight 4.0 and its capabilities as compare of its earlier versions. In this article, I will discuss one of the questions on Data Validation in Silverlight 4.0.

On TemplateMonster.com you can find some very cool Silverlight templates. Unfortunately they are not free, but you can check them anyway.

Silverlight templates are basically pre-made animated design products made with the Silverlight technology - a new solution from Microsoft. The templates made with this technology allow premium animation as well as a fair extent of interactivity available within the animation. Our Silverlight templates - as every other design product from TemplateMonster - are based upon our premium designs and are simply perfect for whatever the needs you may have.

Shawn Wildermuth has recorded a little video demonstrating how to use Visual Studio 2010 and to debug directly on the device.

I am really happy with the experience. Debugging with the emulator is fast too, but there are times when you want to make sure it works on the device and that the performance is what you expect on the device.

In the previous part from the series, Shawn talked about the phone itself.

Vincent Leung suggests you to check some courses which will teach you in the fundamentals of Silverlight and Expression Studio.

Start with basic techniques and build your skills to create more advanced applications. Design Scenarios is comprised of four levels that increase in difficulty with three training modules per level. Each module deconstructs a Silverlight application to teach you must-know features and techniques.

All great applications start with a foundation in design. The Design Principles track gets back to basics with key design concepts that will help you create slick and functional web applications. Each of the four level groupings contains three modules, each focused on design fundamentals.

Javascript author extraordinaire David Flanagan released Canto.js recently, a lightweight wrapper API for canvas, introduced here and documented at the top of the source code. Example:

PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT: canto("canvas_id").moveTo(100,100).lineTo(200,200,100,200).closePath().stroke();
 

Notice three things:

• canto() returns an abstraction of the canvas - a "Canto" object.
• As with jQuery and similar libraries, there's method chaining; each method called on a Canto also returns the Canto.
• lineTo() has been extended to support multiple lines being drawn in a single call.

Instead of setting the ink properties and then painting it, you can do it all in one step:

PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT: canto("canvas_id").moveTo(100,100).lineTo(200,200,100,200).closePath().stroke({lineWidth: 15, strokeStyle: "red"});
 

And plenty more syntactic sugar - check out the API in the source code comments. Sweet!

Thanks @pkeane.

Community Highlights: Using Cappuccino to build the MemoryMiner Web Viewer

Back with a second post is John Fox, creator of MemoryMiner, a digital storytelling application for Mac OS X. John writes about the steps he took to localize his Cappuccino application, a web viewer for MemoryMiner.

The post comes complete with sample code, and its worth a read if you’re interested in localizing your own applications.

By introducing a central licensing server on the Android Marketplace, Google hopes to provide an effective method for protecting Android apps that can currently be copied pretty easily.  The licensing service works with almost every version of Android, all the way back to 1.5.  You can read their documentation to learn how to license your applications.A Brand New "Day" for Adobe

I'm sure I'm not alone in wishing I could take advantage of some of the yummy features in Flex 4 that make precise design and layout possible like, oh, Text Layout Framework (TLF). But some of us are working on...

nodejitsu’s node-http-proxy (via). Exactly what I’ve been waiting for—a robust HTTP proxy library for Node that makes it trivial to proxy requests to a backend with custom proxy behaviour added in JavaScript. The example app adds an artificial delay to every request to simulate a slow connection, but other exciting potential use cases could include rate limiting, API key restriction, logging, load balancing, lint testing and more besides.

Luke Wroblewski, or LukeW as he's known on the web, is a self-described "digital product design & strategy guy" who's been pushing the idea of designing for mobile interfaces first for a while now. He thinks that designing for mobile first works best because 1.) mobile is more important than desktop these days, 2.) mobile forces you to focus on what's really important, and 3.) mobile extends your application's capabilities (GPS, touch-screens, etc.). At first I thought this idea was neat. Now I'm convinced it's nothing short of revolutionary.

Jigsaw puzzle, modular, standard, integrated specifications, simple, annotation-driven, standards compliance, vendor independence, and light-weight deployment are some of the benefits highlighted by the Java EE 6 community.

In the Java EE 6 Feedback from Community series you can learn about how Java EE 6 is currently being used in production, development and deployment environments used within the community, and even feature requests for Java EE 7.

This entry comes from Johan Vos who started to work with Java in 1995. He worked on the Java Linux port with the Blackdown team. He has been doing Java consulting and development for a number of customers in completely different areas. Over the years, he has been active in a number of Java-based community projects, e.g. OSGi, the Glassfish project and JFXtras.org. With LodgON, the company he co-founded, he is mainly working on Java solutions for social networking software. Since he can't make a choice between embedded development and enterprise development, his main focus is on end-to-end Java, combining the strengths of back-end systems and embedded devices. His favorite technologies are currently Java EE / Glassfish at the backend and JavaFX at the frond-end.

Here is a short summary of Java EE 6 from him:

Developers can concentrate on business logic, Java EE 6 is providing a standard for the infrastructure

Read on for other fun stuff ...

1. How are you using Java EE 6 today ? What limits your adoption ?

I'm using Java EE 6 in most of the Enterprise projects I'm doing. This is not a requirement, but it turns out that when talking to people about what they really want, the Java EE 6 platform provides lots of the components that are needed to create an end-to-end solution.

Java EE 6 has evolved since the announcement of J2EE. It became more usable, and easier to develop and configure. In the past, a large number of non-standard libraries and frameworks have been developed since J2EE was too complex for most simple problems. The Java EE expert group clearly has learned from these evolutions, and the current Java EE 6 spec provides the functionality that is available in those frameworks, but as a standard. This is a huge benefit.

2. What Java EE 6 technologies are you using and why ?

I often use JPA. In earlier versions of the Java Enterprise standard, it was very hard to use the persistence layer in order to connect to a database. It was often easier to write your own connection pooling system, and perform SQL queries. But with JPA 2.0, it became much easier to manage the persistence.

I'm using (stateless) Session Beans as well, including the new Singleton Bean, combined with the @Startup annotation. The latter makes it much easier to perform tasks that need to be done only once.

I'm also using JAX-RS and Jersey frequently. In particular, I use Jersey for the communication with clients based on XML. The Transaction API is also something that I often use, either explicitly or implicitly.

3. What is your development and deployment environment ?

I'm mainly using NetBeans 6.9 on Linux. I download the full version of NetBeans, since I need both Java EE as well as JavaFX. NetBeans 6.9 comes pre-installed with Glassfish 3.0.1, so there is no need to download a whole application server to start Java EE 6 development.

4. What previous versions of Java EE / J2EE have you used ? How has the migration to Java EE 6 benefited ?

I've been working with Java EE since version J2EE 1.2. I have always avoided to migrate projects from older to newer versions, but I always start new projects on the latest released version. Early version of J2EE required more implementation-specific XML configuration (remember the sun-cmp-mappings.xml), and once you've done this you don't want to change this. Once projects are in deployment, you cannot easily change the runtime procedures.

Operations are often carried out by a different group than the development team. New versions of the J2EE/Java EE standard require changes in development but also in operations.

One of the benefits of Java EE 6, however, is that it also simplify the packaging and deployment procedures. Using annotations in JAX-RS and Servlets, for example, eliminates the need of XML-based configuration files. And often these configuration files make the handover from development to production deployment difficult. Clearly, the TCO for an average Enterprise project can be much lower when using Java EE6.

5. Describe the benefits of Java EE 6 to you in 120 characters.

Developers can concentrate on business logic, JavaEE6 is providing a standard for the infrastructure.

6. Advice for anybody who is looking at Java EE 6 for their next project ?

Use what you need. Nothing less, and nothing more. Although much easier than 10 years ago, Java Enterprise development can be complex. There are 2 situations you have to avoid:

1. Sometimes, developers don't know about the infrastructure already provided by the Java EE platform, and they are duplicating functionality in their own code. If you look at the JPA and the JTA for example, that provides functionality that is needed in most projects.
2. In a number of other cases, I see developers using features that are available in the appserver, but that are not needed in their application. The Java EE 6 spec is a composition of a number of specifications, and you don't have to use all the sub-specs.
   

7.  What new features you'd like to see in Java EE 7 ?

Java EE 6 brought simplicity in complex enterprise applications, and made a significant move towards web-based projects. Indeed, the Java EE 6 specification is rather focused on the Web. While there are many usecases and real-world scenarios that have the Web as the most important client, I think there should be more attention for other clients, i.e. PDA, mobile phone, TV, JavaCard. Easy integration capabilities between those low-resource devices and high-end backend system will drive the adoption of Java EE.

From another point of view, more integration with the environment would be useful. For example, in a number of cases I would like to execute a specific EJB-call once CPU load is below 50%, or once disk usage is too high. I understand this is rather difficult to standardize in a non-platform dependent way.

Thanks you Johan for taking time to prepare the answers!

Are you using, consulting, training, authoring books, etc in Java EE 6 ? Drop a comment on this blog and I'll line you up for the Q&A session :-)

The Java EE 6 hub is your key resource to learn all about the technology.

And you can always try all Java EE 6 features in GlassFish. Here is an extensive of Java EE 6 & GlassFish demos is available.

Technorati: javaee6 community feedback johanvos glassfish v3

In this snippet we are going learn how to create a new sketchflow project and build a sitemap.