Building Business Applications in SilverLight 2 Today and Tomorrow

Christian Thilmany – UX Blog – www.flyover18.comUser Experience Architect - Microsoft Developer Platform & Evangelism

Agenda

•Silverlight as a platform for business apps

•Building business apps with SilverLight 2 today

•What comes next?

Silverlight 2 Lays the Foundation

•Huge step forward from SL 1– Rectangles -> Buttons– JavaScript -> C#/VB

•Enables business applications today– Has the needed platform building blocks– Core – CLR, BCL, XML, Networking– UI – Core controls, control model, layout, styling,

databinding

•Lays the foundation for what comes next

What platform for your business app?

RichnessRichness

ReachReach

What makes a business app tick?

•Business apps are almost universally about working with data in some shape or form.

•At it’s a heart, a business app needs:–A way to move data between tiers

–A way to shape data (sort, filter, etc..)

–A way to bind & display data

–A way to soundly apply business logic

Moving Data – Simple Cases

•Browser integrated networking stack– Cookie Support

– Make direct HTTP requests (e.g. RSS Feeds)

•Complete Service stack– Use WCF to build SOAP or REST services

– Simple “Add Service Reference” experience to consume

– Use WebClient to consume REST and Plain-Old-XML

Moving Data – Advanced Cases

•Cross-domain Support– Requests constrained to same domain by default– Cross domain enabled via server side policy file

•2-Way communication– Sockets – Low level transport– WCF Duplex – HTTP pull based messaging

•ADO.NET Data Services– Easy way to expose & consume data via REST– Optimal for straight data access layer -> client

scenarios

Data Binding

•Data Binding– One way – any CLR object w/

INotifyPropertyChanged

– Two way

– Value Converters for converting/formatting

– Core Validation Hooks

•Collection Binding– A full & growing set of controls

– Data Template based customization

– Leverage of ObservableCollections (esp. Blend)

Moving and Binding Data

Displaying Data

•Custom Control Model

•Core list controls in the box– Datagrid

– ItemsControl

– ListBox

•Controls Toolkit providing many more– Charts – data visualization

– Business Controls – e.g. spinner, autocompletebox, etc.

•All fully stylable

Styling and Navigating

•Styling• Data Templates

• Control Templates

• Resource Dictionaries

•Navigating• Visual State Manager

• Navigation Controls – e.g. Tree View

Displaying, Styling, and Navigating

All Possible Today but Require Work

•Updateable data

•Validation

•Data paging

•Server side filtering

•Authentication

•More fully featured UI - Navigation

•Business Logic

Business Application FrameworksBusiness Application Frameworks

Base FrameworksBase Frameworks

Base PlatformBase Platform

Silverlight Business Components

Network /ServicesNetwork /Services

ControlsControlsData

BindingData

Binding

CLRCLR

Core UI EngineCore UI Engine

Data Shaping

(XML/LINQ)

Data Shaping

(XML/LINQ)

Navigation

NavigationControl

ModelControl Model

Business ControlsBusiness Controls

Business Logic

Business Logic

Validation

Validation

App Services

App Services

Data Loading

Data Loading

Tutorial and Code at - www.flyover18.com

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