Welcome, to the exciting world of building Rich Enterprise Dashboards with Silverlight. Throughout this book, you will learn how to harness the power of the Silverlight 5.0 platform to build amazing Dashboards. This book goes beyond just showing the nuts and bolts of learning Silverlight and showcases how to create amazing dashboards that offer the best user experience and visual design that will impress your end users and peers.
Chapter 1, The Silverlight Technology, is an overview of the Silverlight 5.0 Platform and teaches you how to build Silverlight applications.
Chapter 2, Overview of Dashboards and Silverlight, answers why you should use Silverlight 5.0 to build dashboards and compares the use of Silverlight and HTML for building dashboards.
Chapter 3, Silverlight Design and Development Tools, is an overview of the different tools you will need to build a dashboard applications.
Chapter 4, Building a Basic Dashboard, is a walkthrough of how to build a simple Silverlight dashboard application.
Chapter 5, Dashboard Types and User Needs, outlines the three main types of dashboards: Strategic, Operational, and Analytical. By the end of this chapter, you will understand how to choose the right dashboard for your project depending upon your needs.
Chapter 6, Designing for Insight, throws light on designing concepts of bringing the end-user's attention to certain information. Using these concepts, we will design a dashboard that supports the scenario we have already created.
Chapter 7, Designing your Dashboard, covers the basics of styling a Silverlight dashboard with Microsoft Expression Blend. Through this chapter you will understand the key styling terminology, learn how to reference resources, and edit basic control templates.
Chapter 8, Building an End-to-End Solution, is an overview of building a real-world Silverlight dashboard application that uses the Microsoft SQL Server Adventure Works sample database. Through this chapter you will explore how to use the N-Tier application model to build out the AdventureWorks dashboard application.
Chapter 9, Data Access Strategies, outlines the different data access strategies and technologies you can use when building your Silverlight dashboard application.
Chapter 10, Building Dashboards in SharePoint and Silverlight, covers how to build a SharePoint web part for hosting a Silverlight dashboard, and how to use the SharePoint Client Object Model to access data hosted in SharePoint.
To build the samples in this book, you will need to have the following available:
Visual Studio 2010 Express or Professional Edition
SQL Server 2008 R2 Express or Developer Edition
Silverlight 5.0 SDK
Silverlight 5.0 Toolkit
Microsoft Expression Blend 4.0 (with Updates for Silverlight 5.0)
Share Point 2010 Foundations (Optional only required for Chapter 10, Building Dashboards in SharePoint and Silverlight)
If you are a .NET developer who wants to create, customize, and design rich enterprise dashboards with Silverlight, then this book is for you. You should have an intermediate understanding of .NET development, with a working knowledge of Microsoft Silverlight.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."
A block of code is set as follows:
<Button x:Name="btnSaveCustomers" Content="Save Customers" Click="btnSaveCustomers_Click" />
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
<endpointaddress="" binding="customBinding"
bindingConfiguration="DashboardCustomBinding0"
contract="Chapter8.Web.Services.IDashboardService" />
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "When the dialog is displayed, click on the Discover button, and select the IDashboardService service contract."
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