This book is for every SharePoint developer who wants to build state-of-the-art solutions with Silverlight—within the enterprise, for consulting clients, or for commercial sale.
Developers increasingly want to build rich applications that run in the SharePoint 2010 browser user interface while offering a far more compelling and engaging experience than conventional web pages. One proven technology gives them all the tools and resources they need to achieve these goals: Silverlight®. Using Silverlight and SharePoint together, developers can create state-of-the-art applications that utilize Silverlight’s outstanding user experience, and fully leverage the vast collections of business data already stored in corporate SharePoint deployments. In SharePoint 2010 Development with Silverlight, two SharePoint gurus collaborate to teach all the concepts and techniques needed to create robust Silverlight solutions for delivery through SharePoint 2010, and present fully documented code that demonstrates superior design and programming.
Bob German and Paul Stubbs draw on their extensive experience developing custom SharePoint business solutions with Silverlight and presenting on these technologies at leading Microsoft developer events. Writing for both experienced and new SharePoint developers, they quickly review the fundamentals of both SharePoint and Silverlight development, and then demonstrate how to use both platforms together to build uniquely powerful solutions. These include:
• Simple and connected Silverlight Web Parts (Chapter 5) and Silverlight Web Part Editing (Chapters 7 and 10)
• Advanced use of the SharePoint Client Object Model including dynamic loading, paging, and server-side exception handling (Chapter 8)
• Use of SharePoint’s REST API including paging, caching, and filtering (Chapter 9)
• Integration with SharePoint search and social networking (Chapter 10)
• Solutions that improve performance and reduce server traffic by passing serialized .NET objects on the web page (Chapter 7)
• Use of SharePoint’s JavaScript API with JQuery (Chapter 7)
• SharePoint applications for Windows Phone 7 (Chapter 12)
• Integration with Office 365 and Windows Azure™ services (Chapter 14)
• Silverlight field types in SharePoint, featuring a mapping field that allows geocoding SharePoint content (Chapter 15)
Including New Features in Silverlight 5
Silverlight 5 introduces a number of new features such as implicit data templates and debugging data binding that can be very helpful in SharePoint solutions. All the examples in this book have been tested with Silverlight 4; some have been extended to showcase the new capabilities in Silverlight 5. See Chapter 3 for a list.
