Book Image

Mastering LOB Development for Silverlight 5: A Case Study in Action

Book Image

Mastering LOB Development for Silverlight 5: A Case Study in Action

Overview of this book

Microsoft Silverlight is fully established as a powerful tool for creating and delivering Rich Internet Applications and media experiences on the Web. This book will help you dive straight into utilizing Silverlight 5, which now more than ever is a top choice in the Enterprise for building Business Applications. "Mastering LOB Development for Silverlight 5: A Case Study in Action" focuses on the development of a complete Silverlight 5 LOB application, helping you to take advantage of the powerful features available along with expert advice. Fully focused on LOB development, this expert guide takes you from the beginning of designing and implementing a Silverlight 5 LOB application, all the way through to completion. Accompanied by a gradually built upon case study, you will learn about data access via RIA and Web services, architecture with MEF and MVVM applied to LOB development, testing and error control, and much more.With "Mastering LOB Development for Silverlight 5: A Case Study in Action" in hand, you will be fully equipped to expertly develop your own Silverlight Line of Business application, without dwelling on the basics of Enterprise Silverlight development.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering LOB Development for Silverlight 5: A Case Study in Action
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Accessing data


Data displayed or updated by a user is stored in a database. In our case, as we are oriented towards Microsoft technologies, it is stored in the SQL Server database.

If you are a veteran, you will remember how connections opened in Windows developments via databases from the application itself, and queries were executed. This was possible as these applications were in the same local network as our server.

When web technologies and globalization came in, things got more complicated. Our database server, due to security reasons, is located behind a firewall, so only certain users/servers can access it. Moreover, our application is executed in environments and languages which do not allow direct access to data, for instance, a web browser and JavaScript language. In order to solve this issue, there were two common options:

  • Legacy web applications used to make a post of the page on the server, accessing the database (no AJAX calls), at that stage. This was an easy approach, although...