Silverlight 4 in Action by Pete Brown is a comprehensive guide to Silverlight application building using C#. It features several practical examples that explore flexible layout, control extensibility, the communication and binding models, rich media, animation and more.
Silverlight 2 is a cross-platform, cross-browser plug-in and runtime for building rich internet applications. Mike Taulty walks through Silverlight basics such as the UI Model progresses to building applications with both Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Studio.
Billy Hollis provides a virtual walkthrough of Microsoft's rich client user interface framework formerly codenamed Avalon and now known as Windows Presentation Foundation. Billy begins with the WPF application model and XAML language then discusses controls and containers in depth.Billy finishes with a discussion of when and where to use WPF while pointing out best practices throughout.
PhoneGap now supports all native functionality on Windows Phone 7 being on par with iOS and Android.
Windows 8 Metro is bringing with it a lot of changes and printing is no exception. Building upon the charm concept, there is a new API and extendable user interface for printing. This API is available for both XAML and JavaScript-based applications.
Visual Studio 2010 comes with a feature they call the “Binding Builder”. This tool, launched from the properties pane, helps developers quickly construct XAML bindings for WPF and Silverlight. But without some help, it doesn’t work when the data context is only set at runtime. Karl Shifflett shows how to work around this using design-time markup extensions.
Silverlight 4 was released back in April without essential development tools.Recently it was announced that Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 is ready. In addition to basic Silverlight 4 support and templates for RIA Services, there are many IDE enhancements to make working with Silverlight, WPF, and XAML easier.
WPF developers often find themselves with an unappetizing choice. They have to either pollute their code-behind files with special case logic or create value converter classes, most of which will only be used once. PyBinding offers a third option, embedding small scripts right inside the XAML.
At PDC 2009, Michael Shim and Rob Relyea presented Microsoft’s plans for the future of XAML. Long term, they plan on unifying the various XAML languages and parsers, but for now developers will only get XAML 2009 for non-UI technologies like Workflow Foundation. The new parser, on the other hand, will bring new functionality to everyone who needs to analyze, manipulate, or generate XAML.
