Book Image

Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook

Book Image

Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook

Overview of this book

Microsoft Silverlight is a programmable web browser plugin that enables features including animation, vector graphics, and audio-video playback – features that characterize Rich Internet Applications. However, Silverlight is a great (and growing) Line-Of-Business platform and is increasingly being used to build data-driven business applications. Silverlight Data Services enable efficient access to your data, allowing you to draw on multiple sources of data and solve particular data problems. There is very little existing material that demonstrates how to build data-driven solutions with the platform. Silverlight 3 made a big step into Line-Of-Business data services and Silverlight 4 builds further upon this. This book will enable .NET developers to get their finger on the pulse of data-driven business applications in Silverlight.This book is not a general Silverlight 3/4 overview book; it is uniquely aimed at developers who want to build data-driven applications. It focuses on showing .NET developers how to interact with, and handle multiple sources of data in Silverlight business applications, and how to solve particular data problems following a practical hands-on approach, using real-world recipes. It is a practical cookbook that teaches you how to build data-rich business applications with Silverlight that draw on multiple sources of data. Most of the covered features work both in Silverlight 3 and 4. However, we cover some that are specific for Silverlight 4, which will therefore not work with Silverlight 3. Where this is the case, it is clearly indicated.Packed with reusable, real-world recipes, the book begins by introducing you to general principles when programming Silverlight. It then dives deep into the world of data services, covering all the options available to access data and communicate with services to get the most out of data in your Silverlight business applications, whilst at the same time providing a rich user experience. Chapters cover data binding, data controls, the concepts of talking to services, communicating with WCF, ASMX and REST services, and much more.By following the practical recipes in this book, which are of varying difficulty levels, you will learn the concepts needed to create data-rich business applications—from the creation of a Silverlight application, to displaying data in the Silverlight application and upgrading your existing applications to use Silverlight. Each recipe covers a data services topic, going from the description of the problem, through a conceptual solution to a solution containing sample code.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook
Credits
About the authors
About the reviewers
Preface

Enabling a Silverlight application to automatically update its UI


In the previous recipes, we looked at how we can display data more easily using data binding for both single objects as well as collections. However, there is another feature that data binding offers us for free, that is, automatic synchronization between the target and the source. This synchronization will make sure that when the value of the source property changes, this change will be reflected in the target object as well (being a control on the user interface). This also works in the opposite direction—when we change the value of a bound control, this change will be pushed to the data object as well. Silverlight's data binding engine allows us to opt-in to this synchronization process. We can specify if we want it to work—and if so, in which direction(s)—using the mode of data binding.

The synchronization works for both single objects bound to the UI as well as entire collections. But for it to work, an interface needs...