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Beginning Silverlight 3

Book Review
Tuesday 16 February 2010.
 

Beginning Silverlight 3
By Robert Lair
ISBN13: 978-1-4302-2377-1
ISBN10: 1-4302-2377-4
Print Book Price: $39.99 / £31.49
eBook Price: $27.99

APress: http://www.apress.com/book/view/1430223774
Computer Manuals: http://www.computermanuals.co.uk

If you are new to Rich Internet Application development with Microsoft’s Silverlight, this book promises to “teach you the fundamental concepts and techniques” which you will need to get started.

At just over 300 pages in length (the web site states 500 pages but it is actually numbered up to page 335 including the index) this modestly-sized book is divided into thirteen chapters that take you from the basics of designing and coding browser-based Silverlight applications using Visual Studio 2008 right through to discussions of more specialized topics such as data-binding, styling and animation.

Before you start, you will need to install a suite of Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio (I got mine from: http://silverlight.net/getstarted) and it would also be highly advantageous, if not strictly necessary, to have a copy of Microsoft’s Silverlight IDE, Expression Blend, which provides a design-and-animation environment to complement the debugging and coding within Visual Studio.

The book progresses in reasonably easily digested chunks as it explains fundamental features such as user interface design using a flavour of XML called XAML, the various methods of aligning and docking controls, how to wire up events such as a button-click to event-handler methods written in C# (Silverlight applications can also be written using VB .NET but this book assumes C#).

Even though the book is aimed at people who are new to Silverlight, I am still a bit uncertain about who its target audience really is. On the one hand, it barely mentions Adobe’s Flash (the technology that dominates the RIA world) so it doesn’t seem to be addressing Adobe developers. On the other hand, it has a section called ‘What Is Visual Studio?’ so it doesn’t seem to be addressing Microsoft developers either. In fact a footnote states that “this book assumes a basic understanding of Visual Studio” and in spite of its somewhat confusing messages, it is my impression that it is primarily intended for Visual Studio users.

While ‘Beginning Silverlight 3’ does exactly what it says it does, I have to say I found it a bit too shallow to be entirely satisfying. Sure, it will get you up and running with Silverlight and it will explains the fundamental features of design, layout and coding with VS and Expression Web. But in around 300 pages, I would have expected a bit more than that. The book feels like an overture without an opera. Just when your feet start tapping and you are ready for the main event, it’s already coming to the end. Maybe APress didn’t want the book to compete with its other titles such as the much bigger volume, ‘Pro Silverlight 3 In C#’, which I shall review shortly.

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