Silverlight 4 in Action

Silverlight 4 in Action (Manning, Pete Brown) is the second book I’ve read about Silverlight. The first was Pro Silverlight 3 in C # (Apress, Matthew MacDonald), which at one time helped me very quickly to get comfortable with Silverlight after WPF. But still, after reading SL4 in Action, it was she who became the favorite for me, and there are arguments to this. True, it would be right to compare SL4 in Action, probably, with Pro Business Applications with Silverlight.

The blog author of the book SL4 in Action Pete Brown, I think, is familiar to most Silverlight and WPF developers. Since 2009, he is an employee of Microsoft, since 2007 Silverlight has become a priority technology for him to develop. In general, you might think that the book Silverlight 4 in Action is the second edition, because there is a book Silverlight 2 in Action , which I unfortunately do not know. So, if you look closely, it turns out that SL2 in Action is written by completely different authors. So, to bring information than SL4 in Action differs from its predecessor is not reasonable - it is a completely different book. And, as I understand it, this is the first book written by Pete Brown, and written, I must say, very well.

Together with the purchase of a paper version of the book, you also get access to the electronic version of the book (pdf), which can be read, for example, from a Kindle device, but only in landscape orientation (I posted photos in my post about how I bought Amazon Kindle ). The book contains about 800 pages, consists of 3 parts and 25 chapters.

The first thing that catches your eye when reading a book is how the chapters are located. Do not believe it, but the chapters on creating your own panels and custom controls (not User Control), as well as on styles and resources are located almost at the very end of the book (unlike the same book Pro Silverlight 3). I don’t know, maybe for novice developers on Silverlight - this will be a difficulty, but, in general, upon reading it seemed to me that everything was quite consistent. And it seems to me very reasonable how the chapters are located in the book, the things that you encounter not so often during development are described at the very end of the book: Writable Bitmap, creating your own panels and controls, animation. The book is more focused on developers who write business applications, and there the animation is not so important. And about my own controls and panels, I remember not many cases in 3 years when I created something like this in Silverlight and WPF. By the way, it was very nice that the example of creating a panel was not the hackneyed WrapPanel, but OrbitPanel, a panel that could have controls in orbits.
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Toward the end of the book, I also liked the example of creating my MediaStreamSource, which generated video and audio noise, instead of video and audio stream, right in Silverlight (on the client side). In general, the examples seem to me very well chosen there, or rather each example is a very frequent task, for example, if you are talking about printing, then an example of creating reports from a list with the support of several pages is given, ready-made code that you can immediately use.

And of course there is a chapter in the book that any reviewer draws attention to: Structuring and testing with the MVVM / ViewModel pattern. Together with the head of WCF RIA Services, which comes immediately after it - they, on 100 pages, describe in great detail the principle of building Silverlight applications, architectural features and subtle points in developing applications for Silverlight. I think that this is the best presentation of the topic from all that I have seen.

In general, I recommend the book to those developers who are going to create or create business applications on Silverlight. I think that was the main audience of the book that Pete Brown was counting on. The only thing that is not clear in the book is that the footnote on page 492 does there:

If you’re really bored from reading, check out http://cornify.com/ Warning: 5th grade girls' Trapper Keeper graphics overload.

Such is the humor ...

PS By the way, today (December 20) Manning has a 50% discount on ebooks, Promotional Code - dotd1220.