UT Dallas .Net User Group - Introduction to Silverlight

Posted: Monday, July 19, 2010      Author: Leblanc Meneses

Leblanc is an entrepreneur, change agent, and technical lead capable of building teams and bringing multi-tenant SaaS products to market.

 

Leblanc has established his implementation abilities with various languages and platforms, generally using a test-driven development approach, and always using a continuous integration process to improve quality and reduce time to market.

 

Leblanc has a Bachelor of Science degree in Electronic Engineering Technology from Texas A&M University.

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I have recently had the opportunity to speak at the UTDallas .Net User Group. The "Introduction to Silverlight Training" was a very enjoyable 3 hour session on Saturday, July 17, 2010. It was organized by UTDallas User group for the officers. The officer's goal was to set up a machine environment, and to complete a Silverlight application for people with no background in Silverlight.

I provided the following list of prerequisites before the training. This list allowed everyone to have their machines preconfigured before the start of the event.

• Must have visual studio 2010, sql server r2 2008
• Silverlight 4 Tools or use the webplatform installer: Silverlight 4 Tools
  • This download will install all components necessary for Silverlight 4 and RIA Services development:
    • Silverlight 4 developer runtime
    • Silverlight 4 SDK (software development kit)
    • Update for Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Web Developer Express 2010 (KB982218)
    • Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010
    • WCF RIA Services V1.0 for Silverlight 4
    • F# Runtime for Silverlight 4
• Install Blend
• Install latest Silverlight Toolkit
• Install Prism
• Install Enterprise Library

About the sample project

After consulting with the group what build to demonstrate, we settled for a "Netflix" movie search concept.

Since this project was going need data access, I initially discussed core concepts of WCF as it pertains to Silverlight. This included dependency injection to facilitate unit testing, securing services using PrincipalPermission, and extending security using IPermission/ CodeAccessSecurityAttribute.

I structured the project, following conventions similar to what I use for most Silverlight business applications. After finishing with the WCF topic, I drew our concept view on the board, and went directly to XAML, following a View-first approach to MVVM.

The sample project that we used can be downloaded here: Introduction to Silverlight Training.zip

List of concepts that the sample covers:

• WCF with Unity dependency injection.
• WCF Delicate config contracts.
• Silverlight + PRISM integration
• PRISM Regions
• PRISM Unity IoC
• MVVM for simple NetflixSearchView.xaml
• TextBoxBehaviours attached behaviors
• IValueConverter to transform the bound ViewModel properties for the view.
• Removing magic strings when implementing INotifyPropertyChanged. i.e. MagicStringExt.cs