Snowball - The Blog

I’m proud to announce that the “Real World .NET 4 and C#” book on which 15 MVPs are working together, is coming close to its release. I’ve written a chapter in this book as well, on Silverlight 5 and MVVM development.

Written by a group of experienced MVPs, this unparalleled book delves into the intricate—and often daunting—world of .NET 4. Each author draws from a particular area of expertise to provide invaluable information on using the various .NET 4, C# 4, Silverlight 4, and Visual Studio tools in the real world. The authors break down the vast .NET 4 Framework into easily digestible portions to offer you a strong foundation on what makes .NET such a popular and successful framework for building a wide range of solutions.

• Breaks down the .NET 4 Framework into easily understandable sections
• Features more than a dozen MVPs serving as authors, each of whom focuses on a particular area of expertise
• Covers such topics as Windows Presentation Foundation, Silverlight 4, Windows Communication Foundation, ASP.NET performance, the entity framework, and more
• Shares C# tips and tricks and .NET architecture best practices from a team of Microsoft MVPs

Real World .NET 4 and C# is the ultimate resource for discovering and understanding the .NET 4 Framework.

The book can be pre-ordered already from Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Real-World-NET-Silverlight-Indispensible/dp/1118021967/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1312574616&sr=8-1

Meanwhile, I’m focusing on my next full Silverlight 5 book, which is due for release end of this year or very early next year!

I’m happy to announce that a new ebook of mine has been published: Getting Ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506.

This ebook is based on SilverlightShow 7-part article series ‘Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506’. While the online article series give references to many external resources, several for one topic, in this ebook we picked the best resource covering the topic, and have included it as full text, together with links to source code where available. Note: approximately 85% of the resources selected are available in full, the rest of the resources are still included as links due to lack of copy permissions or inability to reach the the respective authors.

This ebook collects a total of 100+ articles in full.

Download Table of Contents (.doc / .docx)

From the author: Silverlight is a rapidly evolving technology. Over a time span of 3 years, it has evolved from being a JavaScript-based platform to a full .NET implementation. With 4 versions released and version 5 in the pipeline at the time of writing, Silverlight has more versions than .NET! That makes it hard for book writers such as me to keep up with new features being added.

It seems to me that it’s also difficult to create and manage exams about Silverlight. For the previous versions of Silverlight, there weren’t any exams available. Silverlight 4 is the first version of which an exam is being created. It was possible to take the beta-exam late 2010; the exam will be officially open in Q1 2011. More information about the exam can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/Exam.aspx?ID=70-506&Locale=en-us

With this guide, I aim to make the preparation for the exam a bit easier.

Goal and approach to getting ready

At this point, there’s no official courseware available to study for the exam. In any case, you should therefore be familiar already with Silverlight development. Reading some books on Silverlight will help as well. The list below contains some links to books available for Silverlight 4:

• Silverlight 4 Unleashed
• Silverlight 4 In Action
• Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook
• Pro Business Application with Silverlight 4

On top of that, reading articles and blog posts will help you in passing the exam. In this ebook, I try to create an extensive list of resources along with some explanation on the topic at hand that contain the information you need to know. To structure this, we’ll follow the list of topics described by Microsoft on the exam outline page (http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/Exam.aspx?ID=70-506&Locale=en-us#tab2):

• Laying Out a User Interface (15%)
• Enhancing the User Interface (14%)
• Implementing Application Logic (16%)
• Working with Data (17%)
• Interacting with a Host Platform (11%)
• Structuring Applications (13%)
• Deploying Applications (13%)

(Small note: the outlined percentages total 99%, so you’ll probably get 1% for entering your name!)

Suppose you’re willing to start learning Silverlight enterprise development and you want a good book to start. There are quite a few really good books on the market covering Silverlight 4. If you’re interested mostly in getting to know how to work with data, services and other enterprise-related topics, my own book is a really good start (here you can read some reviews as well).

If you’re not really sure on whether my book will help you, you can purchase a lite (light) version of it now for a mere $9.95. That’s right: you get a few relevant chapters without spending a lot of cash. You can read more about it here.

Here’s what you get:

• Design and develop rich data-driven business applications in Silverlight
• Rapidly interact with and handle multiple sources of data and services within Silverlight business applications
• Understand sophisticated techniques to work with data in your Silverlight business applications, including displaying data in Silverlight applications, binding data to Silverlight controls, getting data from services into Silverlight applications and much more!
• Packed with practical, hands-on cookbook recipes, illustrating the techniques to solve particular data problems effectively within your Silverlight business applications
• eBook available as PDF download

I was looking at Amazon today and noticed that there were now already 12 reviews on our (Kevin and myself) book, giving the book a whopping 5 star rating, which is of course great!

Here are some of the excerpts:

Ideal for those who prefer a tutorial-oriented writing style, August 30, 2010
HOW THIS COOKBOOK WORKED FOR ME: In contrast, this book ("Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook" from PACKT) certainly proved valuable to me by appealing to my learning style, and delivering what was advertised on the cover. I was able to learn a reasonable amount of SL4 specifically for handling business data, using "Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook". The format and approach is ideal for those among us who prefer to "cut to the chase" instead of wading through lengthy tirades. The examples build on one another which served to reinforce key concepts through out the book-- money well spent from my perspective.

Great Book for Silverlight App Development, June 22, 2010
*Getting ready
*How to do it...
*How it works...
*There's more...
*See also
The ample pictures of both the Visual Studio 2010 GUI and running Silverlight applications augment the many code samples. The section that I have appreciated the most has been the chapter on "Talking to WCF RIA Services" as I am working on developing a better understanding of it.
Now that the summer is here, it's a great time to pick up a book or two to read when you're away from your computer. If you are building or want to build applications with Silverlight, I highly recommend this book and suggest that you get a copy for your summer reading.

Best book for Developers., July 18, 2010
Best book for beginner / intermediate developers who have prior knowledge about basics of Silverlight.

Best Silverlight 4 Book To Date, June 19, 2010
I have read through every well-known Silverlight 4 book on the market. I have even read part of Microsoft Step by Step Silverlight 4 (released yesterday 2010-06-18 on Safari and via ebook) - In my humble opinion, this is the best Silverlight 4 book on the market to date. Most of what I have read from the other Silverlight books is covered in Ian Griffith's Silverlight 4 labs up on the Microsoft Silverlight 4 page. If you want a fast track to learn Silverlight 4 and are already familiar with C# .NET, I would recommend picking up a top rated Silverlight 3 book (I personally like books from the Apress series - "Pro Silverlight 3" and the Silverlight 3 Business Intelligence one (forget the exact title) - then the labs on the official Silverlight 4 website and this book.

life savor, August 25, 2010
I had to write a web-application to demo the WCF Data Service I was writing on a very short time budget. This book was a life savor; it had all the answers I needed for consuming the service and displaying in the datagrid. For server side programming, both Effective REST Services and Essential WCF are great.

The best silverlight book i've seen..., 24 Aug 2010
This is an excellent book, packed with step by step exercises so you learn by doing rather than just having reading a book as thick as a house brick. Personally I would buy this book to learn Silverlight from scratch, while its true you wont learn a great deal about the controls but you WILL learn the most important aspects which are accessing and displaying data.
I've been a software developer for 6 years after University and bought so many IT books, so far, this has been the best and most readable. I enjoyed reading and practicing the examples in it unlike so many 20 inch thick programming beasts that you dread opening because they just send you to sleep!
Dont hesitate, just buy it.
My only gripe about this book is that when I brought it I thought it was a tad expensive at £35... But, worth it though.

Concise and relevant, 11 Aug 2010
This book covers the essentials of Silverlight and WPF with practical examples that you are going to follow when building your real world applications. It explains WPF binding and DataTemplates well, and what interfaces your business layer objects need to implement to notify when changes occur.
The recipies on WCF communication (sockets, WCF, net.tcp) are great and give examples of when you would best use them, and cover the config file changes needed too.
A refreshingly slim book too - lets face it, who wants a 1000+ page book covering everything and the kitchen sink. You want a straight to the point book that covers the essentials you would use at work and touches all the major areas. Highly recommended.

If you want to read more reviews or order my Silverlight 4 Data and services cookbook, head to Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk or alternatively you can order via the Packt website as well!

With my book I wrote together with Kevin Dockx, Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook available for a couple of weeks now, I decided to do a small search on reviews. I’ll be honest, I took all I could find right now.

Here’s the ones I found:

Richard Costall:

“Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook is a great publication, and worthy of a place any Silverlight developers bookshelf. The formula of ‘recipes’ works well, with well explained, yet simple examples covering almost everything you’d ask when starting out building business applications in Silverlight. It highlights Silverlight 2 and Silverlight 3 functionality differences, yet is right up to date on Silverlight 4.”

Complete review at: http://www.nxtgenug.net/Article.aspx?ArticleID=368

Vikram Pendse writes:

“My Review Comments : * * * * * (5 Stars)..Simple Amazing book !..Go and Grab your Copy Today !!! :)

Impressed with this Book?..want to have a look at? Ok ! What you see is what you get ! kidding..You can download a sample chapter right away !”

Complete review at http://pendsevikram.blogspot.com/2010/05/microsoft-silverlight-4-data-and.html

Damir Tomicic writes:

“Das Buch ist sehr praktisch geschrieben. Der Leser merkt sofort, dass Gill und Kevin die Ansätze selbst ausprobiert und für die Leser optimiert haben. Die gewählte Sprache ist einfach, die Beispiele auch für Anfänger geeignet. Ein guter Einstieg in das Thema.”

Complete review at: http://tomicic.de/2010/05/05/MicrosoftSilverlight4DataAndServicesCookbookGillcleeren.aspx

Review on Amazon.com

“Good Introduction to the Datagrid, Dataform, and different Services (4/5)”

Complete review at http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Silverlight-Data-Services-Cookbook/product-reviews/1847199844/ref=dp_db_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

Interested in my book as well? It is available from Packt Publishing, Amazon.com, Amazon UK and many other retailers as well! I hope you enjoy it!