I recently found out that I will be part of a project that will use Silverlight. Since I will be doing interface design for this application I was wondering if I could get help with some tips & resources.
So what are the tips that you wish you had gotten when you started with Silverlight?
And what resources have you found valuable for starting and progressing with Silverlight?
Already found a similar post but I still would like more:
Good resource for learning Silverlight 2 development
Clarification:
I will be creating the interface for an application where the back-end stuff (algorithms) are being created by a developer intern (I'm an intern also).
QuickStarts silverlight.net Quickstarts for several different topics.
Related
I am trying to learn Silverlight 4.0...i have 3+ years of Exp in .NET but do not know about silverlight...
So request you to suggest me how to start to learn Silverlight 4.0...
I there any good book available in market which teach me or any url...
Also i want some dummy expamples..
Thankx in advance.
Google is your best friend. There are so manny resources available for Silverlight, so that is is impossible to list them all here. Some of my personal recommendations are
wrox silverlight 4 book
Channel 9 has allot of videos
concerning silverlight
browse msdn tutorials:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163404.aspx
and last but not lease
silverlight.net =>
http://www.silverlight.net/learn/videos/all/
And when you think you have a good understanding of the workings of silverlight / WPF you can switch to the MVVM pattern:
http://csharperimage.jeremylikness.com/2010/04/model-view-viewmodel-mvvm-explained.html
Check the official website of SilverLight which is http://www.silverlight.net/.
It contains videos and tutorial that you can start with.
I'm new in silverlight and prism framework and I want to explore some working silverlight applications that are based on prism.
As well as the included samples, there's an interesting set of articles here, complete with source code.
There's also some source at Elegant Code which I found useful, as well as a whole list of examples and tutorials at Patterns and Practices Guidance.
Also be aware that there are many alternatives to Prisim, and you could always write your own simple MVVM architecture if you were interested in learning more about it. For more information, Jeremy Likeness has a great article over at code project about the architecture, entitled MVVM Explained. I found this to be hugely helpful when developing my first Silverlight MVVM application.
Check out Prism hands-on labs and quickstarts (make sure to scroll to the bottom of the page):
Also, you may find this episode on Understanding the Value of Prism useful.
I am a ten-year veteran of ASP.NET and C# development and I'm moving into a position where I will be doing much more Windows Forms and WPF development. I have minimal experience with these technologies.
Can you recommend any good books or resources that will help me ramp up on these technologies quickly? I'd like to find resources that skip over basic .NET programming topics and get right to the heart of good application architecture, design and implementation.
There are many resources on windowsclient.net. This is the official, Microsoft run Windows Forms and WPF site.
That being said, I'd recommend only trying to get a very basic idea of Windows Forms, and instead, focus on learning WPF. This will help for Silverlight development, as well. WPF is the newer technology, and really is a better path going forward for future proofing yourself. By learning it first, you won't have to unlearn many bad habits you'll pick up with Windows Forms development.
Take a look at MEF and Prism if you are looking for good WPF application design. As for books - I'd recommend Apress' Pro WPF in C# 2008 (Don't know when it will be updated for 4.0, but relative few new things to learn here (mostly a few new controls and improvements in existing controls/syntax).
I really liked this video by Jason Dolinger on the MVVM pattern for WPF. It is a really great into what you can do with WPF, how data binding works, and helps get you thinking in the right direction.
http://blog.lab49.com/archives/2650
Currently as my job profile i am more working on asp .net application but i also wanted to have my hands on silverlight application. so, i just decided to build one silverlight 4 application in my spare time and on weekends.
We are having a team of around 4 people. We also tried for commercial application but as we can only develop it in our available time we can not commit on timeline as well as we people are new to SL, so first we need to learn concept and implement it. (Though we know the concept of binding, commanding,templates etc.)
Now i just thought to work on project like creating a social networking site in SL 4
having facilities like forum, blogs, calander, task, dashboard etc.
We want to use features like .Net RIA Service, Entity Framework, MVVM pattern, SL 4.
Objective here is to learn new concepts as well as to get some good project experince in silverlight.
Now,
what you people suggest is it a good idea ?
If yes then the project selected is correct or you suggest some other project ?
Any pattern or technology related suggestions ?
This is quite a vague set of questions but I'll attempt to give my 2 pennies worth of advice.
As a learning project this is as good an idea as any to get going with. As a commercial idea it probably isn't such a good one due to there not being any niche in your product. It has all already been done, and been done successfully by the likes of Facebook and Twitter. Developing any kind of social media site is incredibly difficult as the market is already fairly saturated. As I said though, as a learning project it's quite nice as you can just borrow concepts and ideas from other sites and you can concentrate on you main goals of gaining knowledge in the various technologies.
Whatever you decide to do I'd say split the project up into much smaller components rather than having the end goal in sight. Try to take more of an agile approach by setting yourself 2-3 week targets. It should help keep the momentum going. My experience is that learning projects tend to die a death as people get bored of the concept and lose motivation to do it. By keeping the tasks small you get to see small results often. This should help keep you motivated as you move from requirement to requirement.
Personally I think setting up personal projects and goals like this are a great way of learning new technologies - good for you!! :-)
From a tooling perspective it sounds like SL4 is an ideal route to follow. This is highly likely to be released in early 2010 and has some awesome new features compared to SL3. Would also recommend using VS2010 and WCF RIA Service too.
From a code sharing POV have you considered hosting your project on Codeplex? This will give you a hosted TFS server to manage your source code in a distributed way. This is bound to save you some big bucks.
As far as document management is concerned Google Docs are certainly worth a look (as is Google Sites as a really easy to set up (albeit simple) project management portal).
Finally, I can't recommend learning SketchFlow highly enough. As a prototyping tool for silverlight it is really, really cool. Take a look at the PDC video for a great kick start on this.
Good luck :-)
I am already familiar with Silverlight programming but not have any experience with GIS.
my role as silverlight developer is only to display existing GIS data.
If you guys have any experience with arcGIS silverlight control & api, what else do you think I must learn to be able to use it.
any learning reference could be helpful. thanks.
you don't need alot, you can dl the SDK from ESRI and then check out thier help site they have crap-loads of examples, both downloadable source and live samples (with the source code). If you have a license, you can use bing maps in the ESRI silverlight control--there are assemblies in the SDK for that.
as an aside, the SDK also includes the WPF assemblies as well.
It helps to have a basic understaind of the ESRI Map and Graphics object model for any of their API's (they all have similarities). The Silverlight API is much simpler than the Arcobjects API, but shares many of the same patterns.
If you are performing specific operations (such as distance calculations, map annotating, etc) there may be very specific concepts that will help. Can you post a question with more details about your goal?
I have made some different projects that used GIS data. I haven't tried arcGIS but used Bing Maps (http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/maps/archive/2009/03/18/introducing-the-virtual-earth-silverlight-map-control.aspx) and a Silverlight component from ThinkGeo (http://gis.thinkgeo.com/Microsite1/MapSuiteSilverlight2/tabid/709/Default.aspx?adcampaign=Map+Suite+Silverlight+Edition&leadsource=Google&adgroup=Silverlight+General&adtype=search&keyword=silverlight+map&gclid=CIu976aW0Z0CFZ1h4wodwGsDsA).
I think that Bing Maps is really easy to work with and there is lots of help available online. Maybe that can help you with some starting resources to argGIS?!
Chris is right. The help site has enough samples. I don't have Silverlight skills, so I really struggled with it and I was pretty bad at it too. I think the silverlight learning curve is much steeper.
I tried to wire up GIS tools/buttons to a ribbon control. It sort of worked, a silverlight dev would do a better job:
View esri-silverlight-toc-png
If you just need to control visibility, between services. It's real easy. Or if you have one service, with layers inside that you need to control...that's easy too.
But if you need both, you will have to roll your own layer control. I wired it up to a treeview, but it doesn't look sexy. ESRI may have a better TableofContents control out now, they didn't when I was messing with it:
View esri-silverlight-png