A Sample Line of Business App Built using Silverlight 4
Kiril MatevTechnical EvangelistInfragistics
Contents
What is SilverlightWhat applications is it suitable forSilverlight as a platform for LOB applicationsSample LOB Application demo:
• UI Declaration• Data Access• Data Persistence• Export to Excel• Printing• Data Visualization• Deploy application out of browser
What is Silverlight
An application framework for deploying two-tiered browser-(and out-of-browser)-based applications.
Current version is Silverlight 4, with Silverlight 5 to be released later in 2011.
Platform support
Silverlight applications need the Silverlight plugin to run, available in Windows-based, and some MacOS browsers (Mozilla, Safari).
Silverlight is the native development platform on the Windows Phone 7.
Animations & Transitions
Silverlight is well-suited for creating rich UIs:• Enables rapid development of rich UI due to its built-in
support for declarative specification of animations and transitions.
• Enables the animation of any property, which makes animations/transitions easy to set up.
• SL 5 will use hardware accelerated graphics, so animations/transitions are faster and do not burden the CPU
Layout control
Silverlight offers rich layout capability:• Flexible GUI for different resolutions – Silverlight makes it
easy to scale controls to different sizes• Silverlight offers built-in layout panels which rearrange
layout automatically when the resolution or module size or locations change
Templating
Silverlight enables flexible control appearances:• Silverlight adds flexibility in defining the appearance of
different control elements, such as scrollbars, headers, footers, rows, etc.
• This enables developers to quickly change the application’s UI without affecting its behavior
Styling
Silverlight makes application styling easier:• Colors, gradient fills, brushes, rotations, tile brushes - a
rich framework of readily available • Pure-text declarations of styles makes them easy to
maintain• Blend is a styling tool that can be used to setup
animations, effects and transitions using a graphical user interface
Maintenance
Silverlight cuts down the cost of maintenance:• Data binding, animations, transitions are implemented by
Silverlight, so the added richness in the UI comes at no cost for the developer in terms of an increased code base
Increased Developer Productivity
• Declarative data binding• Allows declarative specification of layout• Using C# both on the client and server
A Sample LOB Application
Objective:Create an application to display a few views of data from the Northwind database:1. Customers (grid, editable)2. Daily Sales (grid and chart)3. Sales By Category (grid and chart)4. Browse invoice data (pivot grid)5. Export to Excel, Print, Save/Load Layout Settings6. Deploy application out of browser
UI Declaration
Declare a ribbon control and a tab control containing the different views
Separate application units into reusable controls
CRUD Operations
Implement CRUD operations using RIA Services
Automatically commit changes made in the grid controls to the database
Data Persistence
Implement saving/loading of user settings (selected tab index) in isolated storage.
IsolatedStorage allows two ways to store data locally on the user’s computer:• Key-value pairs• Files
Export to Excel
Implement export to Excel of grid data with no dependencies on MS Office libraries.
Printing
Implement printing of the currently active grid control.
Silverlight 4 supports printing using the PrintDocument class, which can print any visual element.
Data Visualization
Implement a chart with zooming, panning, and tooltips for the daily sales values.
Silverlight 4 enables zooming, panning, which are especially useful in charting scenarios.
Questions and Answers
