Building WPF and Silverlight Applications: A Complete Guide

Building WPF and Silverlight Applications takes a novel approach to the business or learning about these two exciting and powerful technologies. We recognize that, if you're interested in these topics, you're probably a professional developer. As such, you need to know more than just the new technology's grammar and syntax. You need to know good design patterns, how to build robust n-tier architectures to support your code, how to deploy and maintain it. In short, all those small but important details that are so often omitted when you work through code samples in a book or on MSDN.

Our book aims to redress this balance. In a series of clearly structured chapters we give you an information packed tutorial in how these technologies work-their similarities and their differences-and explain how they can be integrated with the best architectural design patterns for maximum efficiency and ease of use. Then we go one stage further and work through a series of projects from design, through implementation to deployment showing the thinking and detail required to create fully working WPF and Silverlight applications that will stand up to use and abuse in the real world of professional work.

• How to structure a WPF/Silverlight application
• To use WF to create complex workflows to drive your apps business processes
• Best Practice for communicating with a SOA backbone
• Work with Silverlight and RIA services, to provide a rich client experience
• Use RESTful WCF to publish RSS feeds
• How to create true n-Tier apps using all of the technologies discussed above

Building WPF and Silverlight Applications gives developers learning about WPF and Silverlight 3 a deep grounding in the techniques required for using WPF and Silverlight in the professional environment. The book emphases the design patterns and n-tier architectural planning that is required to enable applications to stand up to real-world use and abuse by end users. This is critical information for the professional developer but it is very often omitted from training manuals and online articles.

The book focuses on two of the most widely used, and widely purchased, technologies with the Microsoft programming environment: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight 3. By dealing with both technologies together the book covers both web and desktop programming and will have a very wide audience appeal.