Camera! Action!

Silverlight 4 in Action by Pete Brown

Sliverlight is certainly a large topic to cover and this book stretches to around 750 pages. At many points you get the feeling that there is more that the author would like to say but is forced by size constraints to only give a brief introduction. The chapter on MVVM is a really good example of this.

The book is really well organised into three sections. The first section can be broadly divided into two parts, with the initial part covering the application model, XAML syntax, integration with the browser and the new ability of Silverlight to go out-of-browser (which offers a pretty good deployment story for in-house applications). The second part of the first section covers the rendering model, layouts and panels, controls and user controls, and input. There’s enough detail in these parts to give you a good understanding of what’s going on when a Silverlight application runs.

The second section, entitled “Structuring Your Application”, covers data binding – though this is so fundamental that it is surprising it is not in the first section of the book, forms and grids (the staple GUI elements for business applications), input validation, navigation within the application, MVVM for structuring the application, and network and communications which includes a large amount on WCF RIA services which allow the front end Silverlight application to get its data from a backend server. This section is really the guide on writing typical business applications using this technology.

The third section, “Completing the experience”, offers a whole series of extras, covering graphics and effects, printing, media display and capture,and working with bitmaps, all of which is intermixed with some more WPF-like material on animation and behaviours, resources, styles and control templates, and information on creating your own layouts and panels.

The book has such broad coverage that it is a pity that the author can’t go into more depth in certain places. For example, he describes the rendering pipeline really well, and it would be really good to have even more detail about this subsystem.

Throughout the book, the examples are all well chosen and illustrate beautifully the points that are covered in the various sections. This book is certainly a really informative read and set me up nicely to go to other books for more in-depth material on the various topics.