Book Image

Microsoft Silverlight 4 and SharePoint 2010 Integration

By : Gaston C. Hillar
Book Image

Microsoft Silverlight 4 and SharePoint 2010 Integration

By: Gaston C. Hillar

Overview of this book

Silverlight is a powerful development platform for creating engaging, interactive user experiences for the Web, desktop, and mobile applications. Integrating Silverlight RIAs in SharePoint 2010 offers amazing opportunities to combine the power and flexibility offered by SharePoint. It is easy to create great user experiences when you have a step-by-step guide to implement Silverlight 4 applications on SharePoint 2010 sites. This book is not a primer on Silverlight 4 or SharePoint 2010. This book focuses on the integration of Silverlight 4 and SharePoint 2010 and provides step-by-step guidelines for implementing Silverlight RIAs in SharePoint. It is filled with real-world examples that depict the various techniques for interacting with data and services provided by this powerful business collaboration platform, for the enterprise and the Internet. As you sit reading this, you might have already started thinking about the benefits of implementing multiple Silverlight applications in a SharePoint environment. This book will help bring those thoughts to fruition. This book begins with the fundamental concepts of integrating Silverlight 4 with SharePoint 2010, such as the preparation of the development environment to create applications using Silverlight 4 and the addition of one or more Silverlight RIAs to a SharePoint site. Then, it moves on to the SharePoint Silverlight Client Object Model world, using step-by-step examples to combine a Silverlight application and a SharePoint module. It also covers methods to deploy and debug the Silverlight application while it runs as Silverlight Web Part in a SharePoint page. The book teaches you to take advantage of the new features offered by Visual Studio 2010 to browse SharePoint lists. Once the reader has control over the SharePoint Silverlight Client Object Model and its asynchronous operations in Silverlight applications, it is time to access external databases through the new Business Connectivity Services (BCS) and interact with workflows. Then, the book explains to perform CRUD operations by consuming the new SharePoint 2010 WCF Data Services in Silverlight. In the end, you'll learn to utilize Silverlight 4's rich media features to add effects and interactive animations to images and videos, thus offering the final touches to the Silverlight 4 and SharePoint 2010 integration learning experience. By the end of this book, you'll learn to take advantage of the unique features offered by Silverlight in order to create impressive UX that interact with SharePoint 2010.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Microsoft Silverlight 4 and SharePoint 2010 Integration
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
Preface

Managing data in a Silverlight RIA included in a SharePoint solution


So far, we have been able to create, deploy, and debug a Silverlight RIA that read data from a list in the SharePoint server. It is also possible to insert, update, and remove items from these lists. In fact, the typical LOB (Line-Of-Business) RIA performs CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) operations. Therefore, we can create a Silverlight RIA to perform some of the CRUD operations with the existing list of tasks, by using more features provided by the SharePoint 2010 Silverlight Client OM.

We could improve our existing Silverlight RIA that displays data from the existing list in a grid. However, we are going to create a new Silverlight RIA and then, we will improve both applications to work together to offer a complex LOB solution.

We will analyze diverse alternatives to simplify the deployment process and show how to debug a Silverlight RIA that queries data from a SharePoint server.

Working with the SharePoint...