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 you’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. It’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 it’s a useful programming resource for developers not using ASP.NET also. If you’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 you’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, you’ll be able to describe Silverlight and explain why you’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 unders

There has been a huge surge in interest in ‘Web 2.0’ technologies over the last couple of years. Microsoft’s contribution to this area has been the ASP.NET AJAX and Silverlight technologies, coupled to a supporting framework of ancillary tools. This book aims to be a no nonsense introduction to these technologies for the rapidly growing number of people who are realizing that they need Microsoft-based ‘Web 2.0’ skills on their CV. It gives people a grounding in the core concepts of the technologies and shows how they can be used together to produce the results that people need. The author has unparalleled experience of introducing people to these technologies.

* Completely up to date with the ASP.NET 2.0 technology and demonstrates the new best-practices and coding styles that it requires * Focuses on developer’s needs, explaining the technology in a manner applicable to development projects * Provides comprehensive coverage of ASP.NET 2.0 (with C# .NET 2.0), providing thorough understanding of the subject area

Author Steven Sanderson has seen the ASP.NET MVC Framework mature from the start, so his experience, combined with comprehensive coverage of all the new features, including those in the official MVC development toolkit, offers the clearest understanding of how this exciting new framework can improve your coding efficiency. With this book, you’ll gain invaluable up-to-date knowledge of security, deployment, and interoperability challenges. The ASP.NET MVC 2 Framework introduces a radical high-productivity programming model that promotes cleaner code architecture, test-driven development, and powerful extensibility, combined with all the benefits of ASP.NET 3.5. In this book, the core model-view-controller (MVC) architectural concepts are not simply explained or discussed in isolation, but are demonstrated in action. You’ll work through an extended tutorial to create a working e-commerce web application that combines ASP.NET MVC with C# language features and unit-testing best practices. By gaining this invaluable, practical experience, you’ll discover MVC’s strengths and weaknesses for yourself—and put your best-learned theory into practice.

ASP.NET 3.5 is the principal standard for creating dynamic web pages on the Windows platform. Pro ASP.NET 3.5 in VB 2008: Includes Silverlight 2 raises the bar for high–quality, practical advice on learning and deploying Microsoft's dynamic web solution. Updated with everything you need to integrate Silverlight 2.0 into your ASP.NET applications, this book teaches you all about Silverlight's exciting features so that your ASP projects can be rich in visual flair and compelling to the user. You'll learn how to use the new levels of abstraction in the Entity Framework to design elegant, powerful application architectures. Seasoned .NET professionals Matthew MacDonald, Mario Szpuszta, and Vidya Vrat Agarwal explain how you can get the most from these groundbreaking technologies. They cover ASP.NET 3.5 as a whole, illustrating both the newer features and the functionality carried over from previous versions of ASP. This book will give you the knowledge you need to code real ASP.NET 3.5 applications in the best possible style.

Pro Silverlight 1.1 is the perfect reference: you’ll learn about the features that put Silverlight in direct competition with Adobe Flash and, best of all, you’ll experience the plumbing of .NET and the design model of WPF through Silverlight—-all of the same .NET technology that developers use to design next-generation Windows applications. Author Matthew MacDonald provides an expertly crafted tutorial written from professional developer to professional developer. You’ll learn how to create rich media applications using Silverlight across browsers and platforms.

This book explains how to use the ASP.NET AJAX features to create richer, more responsive dynamic websites. It explains the architecture, including the ASP.NET server elements and the client-side Javascript library, and runtime. The book will walk you through examples for each feature element, demonstrating how the client and server interact to produce a better web application. The book also progresses in a way that educates you on how ASP.NET and AJAX build on each other to provide a comprehensive framework for rich application development.