Getting Started with Silverlight 2

I was planning on doing my next application at work in WPF, but it turned out that Silverlight 2 was a better fit. So, I've been doing some quick and dirty work to get up to speed. The good news is that the UI model with XAML is pretty similar (I'll let others get into the specific differences). The bad news is that everything happens asynchronously. Okay, so that's not really bad news, it's just something to get used to. I'll be covering some of my specific learnings on asynchronous programming a bit later, so stay tuned.

Database Programming
As I said earlier, I write business applications for a living. And that means database access. Silverlight does not support direct database access (such as ADO.NET or LINQ to SQL), so that means that everything happens through network calls. WCF is the best choice for this (with some limitations).

It took me a while to get comfortable with this concept. The best introductory resource that I found is actually on the silverlight.net site, including very useful tutorial videos. The most helpful one for me was #58 "How to Consume WCF and ASP.NET Web Services in Silverlight" by Tim Heuer. It's about 23 minutes and definitely worth the time.

Here's the short version:

1. Create a WCF Service using basicHttpBinding (Silverlight 2 only supports this binding).
2. Generate a proxy class for the service in the Silverlight application using the standard Add Service Reference.
3. Create an instance of the proxy.
4. Hook up a call-back by assigning a handler to [methodName]Completed. Visual Studio is good at helping create the stubs for you (see the video for a demo).
   
5. Call the [methodName]Async() to kick off the call.

Resources
If your applications are data centric, then you will definitely want to check out John Papa's book: Data-Driven Services with Silverlight 2 -- with an introduction by Tim Heuer. This book is all about data access, whether you are creating your own services or consuming existing services. This is a relatively short book (at about 350 pages -- small for a tech book), but the text and samples (easily available for download) are very good. By the time that I got to the end, I was so comfortable with consuming services with Silverlight and working with the asynchronous calls that I could code them up with my eyes closed. I'm planning on doing a full review of this book in a later post.

The official Microsoft site has a lot to offer. In addition to the video mentioned above, there are lots more on all different topics. Just check out http://silverlight.net/Learn/.

I mentioned the Matthew MacDonald WPF book in a previous post. The good news is that there is a sibling Silverlight book: Pro Silverlight 2 in C# 2008. This is a very good overview of Silverlight 2 including XAML basics, layout, controls, animation, styles/templates, service calls, and browser integration. The accompanying samples are also very good and cover all of the included topics.

I always point to dnrTV for good web-casts. You can check out episode #127: Shawn Wildermuth on Silverlight 2 Data. Lots of interesting tidbits scattered throughout.

My Experience So Far...
Silverlight 2 is an adventure. It's not quite web programming, and it's not quite WinForms programming. It sits squarely between the two. More details coming up...