Book Overview

Silverlight brings to the table a number of unifying concepts that both web and desktop developers should find appealing to build business applications. In this book, David Yack shares with readers the information he wishes he could have found in one place when he got started with Silverlight. The book is designed as a quick start learning guide focused on the essential parts of Silverlight a developer new to Silverlight should focus on first. This book establishes the foundations developers need to get started quickly with Silverlight.

The hardest part of learning a new technology is navigating and finding all the right information to get up to speed quickly. The goal of this book is not to teach .NET programming basics. We figure that if you’re reading this book you have had some experience doing .NET development. Most people who buy this book are looking for a quick way to get up to speed with Silverlight. More specifically we are going to focus on the parts of Silverlight that are useful for building business applications. This book is the introduction to building business applications with Silverlight. The goal of this book is simple; provide a quick way for an existing .NET developer to learn the basics of Silverlight.

Silverlight 4 Jumpstart is a revision of Silverlight 3 Jumpstart integrating information on the new features of Silverlight 4. Inside you will find coverage of the new data binding changes, out of browser capabilities and Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) to name a few. Additionally, coverage has been expanded for some areas like application navigation.

Who this book for

The target audience for this book is solution architects and developers that are just getting started building applications using Microsoft Silverlight. This includes people building the server side components even though they aren't directly coding in Silverlight. Project Managers might also benefit from some of the early chapters to understand issues the team may encounter.

About the Author

David Yack is the CTO of Colorado Technology Consultants, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner based in Colorado. He is a Microsoft Regional Director and a Microsoft MVP for Silverlight. As a senior hands’ on technology and business consultant with over 20 years of industry experience, David enjoys developing applications on the Microsoft platforms, specializing in large system architecture and design. David embraced Silverlight early on when it used to be called WPF/E. As part of a group of Silverlight insiders David regularly provides product feedback to the Microsoft Silverlight development team. David has been helping clients migrate and build new applications on Silverlight, as well as helping to mentor and train their staffs. David is a member of the INETA Speaker Bureau and is a frequent speaker at user group and industry events. David has been on the author team of two other .NET related books and recently completed the book CRM as a Rapid Development Platform (TheCRMBook.com). He lives in Colorado Springs with his wife and two children. You can read his blogs at blog.davidyack.com and crm.davidyack.com.