Building a Silverlight LOB Application

Posted Sat, Jan 15 2011 17:27 by Deborah Kurata

This is the first in a series of posts that will build a Silverlight Line of Business (LOB) application. This application builds a Student Management application for my company, InStep Technologies, Inc.

One of the goals for these posts is to find the right level of sample code that is complex enough to be useful, yet simple enough to understand and short enough to paste relevant code. So this example tries to keep the code as simple as possible and yet accomplish the application's requirements.

These posts use Silverlight 4.0 and the Silverlight Toolkit. So if you are going to work through these posts, here are the prerequisites:

1) Download and install Silverlight 4.

Visual Studio 2010 comes with Silverlight 3. You need to download and install the Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 from here.

NOTE: Visual Studio 2010 SP1 comes with Silverlight 4, so you don't need to download and install it separately.

2) Download the Silverlight Toolkit.

This download provides many additional controls and themes. You can download it from here.

That's it. Now you are ready to dive into building a Silverlight LOB application following these posts:

Click on a link to navigate to the desired post.

NOTE: The Silverlight XAML code requires that namespaces be defined with an xmlns statement, similar to the Import statement (VB) and Using statement (C#). These xmlns lines are very long and do not wrap well went pasted into blog posts. For this reason, carriage returns were added to the xmlns statements in the posts in this series. However, THERE MUST BE NO EXCESS SPACES OR RETURNS in the xmlns quoted strings in the code. Otherwise you will get "does not exist in xxx namespace" errors.

Enjoy!

EDIT 2/19/11: Added the note regarding the namespaces as per reader feedback. Thanks for the suggestion!

EDIT 2/25/11: Corrected a broken link.

EDIT 5/1/11: Added note regarding Visual Studio 2010 SP1.

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Comments

# Building a Multi-Page Silverlight LOB Application

Saturday, January 15, 2011 7:29 PM by Deborah's Developer MindScape

Many Line of Business (LOB) applications need to accomplish more than one objective. For example, a Student

# Theming a Silverlight Application using Existing Themes

Sunday, January 16, 2011 12:20 AM by Deborah's Developer MindScape

There are two ways to apply styles in a Silverlight application: explicit styles and implicit styles

# Theming a Silverlight Application using Custom Themes

Sunday, January 16, 2011 2:06 AM by Deborah's Developer MindScape

If you want to give your line of business application a nice color theme and some basic interactive styles

# Adding a New Page to a Multi-Page Silverlight Application

Sunday, January 16, 2011 7:49 PM by Deborah's Developer MindScape

So, you've started building a Silverlight Line of Business (LOB) application using the Silverlight

# Silverlight Cream for January 16, 2011 -- #1029

Sunday, January 16, 2011 10:47 PM by Community Blogs

In this Issue: Michael Washington , Jesse Liberty , Deborah Kurata ( -2- , -3- , -4- ), Sergey Barskiy

# Populating a DataGrid in a Silverlight Application

Saturday, January 22, 2011 4:36 PM by Deborah's Developer MindScape

One of the common requirements of a line of business application is to present data. This post demonstrates

# Populating a DataGrid with Dynamic Columns in a Silverlight Application using MVVM

Sunday, January 23, 2011 7:52 PM by Deborah's Developer MindScape

When binding to a DataGrid, in most cases you have a fixed number of columns and a variable number of

# Charting in a Silverlight Application using MVVM

Saturday, January 29, 2011 6:22 PM by Deborah's Developer MindScape

Data visualization is often a requirement in today's line of business (LOB) applications. Plus charts

# Missing Chart Legend

Saturday, January 29, 2011 7:19 PM by Deborah's Developer MindScape

If you built a custom theme for your application (similar to this prior post ) then you may find that

# Accessing Data in a Silverlight Application: EF

Monday, January 31, 2011 12:29 AM by Deborah's Developer MindScape

One of the challenges of building a Silverlight line of business (LOB) application is getting the data

# Updating Data in a Silverlight Application: EF

Saturday, February 05, 2011 4:16 PM by Deborah's Developer MindScape

This prior post covered the details of setting up a database, defining an entity model using Entity Framework

# Simple Silverlight MVVM Base Class

Monday, February 07, 2011 12:55 AM by Deborah's Developer MindScape

As you start to add more Views and associated View/Models to your Silverlight line of business (LOB)

# re: Building a Silverlight LOB Application

Sunday, February 13, 2011 3:10 PM by Brian Byrdsong

This series is incredible.  Thanks for taking the time to show a newcomer to silverlight (like me) great fundamentals.

Thanks again,

Brian

# Silverlight Simple MVVM Printing

Saturday, February 19, 2011 2:03 PM by Deborah's Developer MindScape

Many users want to print information from your line of business (LOB) application. This post covers the

# Silverlight Charting: Formatting the Axis

Saturday, March 05, 2011 3:41 PM by Deborah's Developer MindScape

When displaying a chart, you may want to format the x and y axes. This post covers how to set the axis

# Silverlight Charting: Formatting the Tick Marks

Saturday, March 05, 2011 4:53 PM by Deborah's Developer MindScape

The tick marks on the charts may not look like much, but they can be helpful to clarifying the meaning

# re: Building a Silverlight LOB Application

Wednesday, May 04, 2011 10:17 AM by Eduardo (Brazil)

Congratulations, your articles are great.

I'm learning a lot from them.

I'm starting to develop a model project (LOB Application via Silverlight) and I would take any questions.

In the MVVM, what the best validation mechanism? is via DataAnotation?

If I am using Command and need to make alterations to the layout, what better mechanism?

Spending Panel by parameter and change it in VM?

Or in the traditional way, via events?

It's possible to use both modes?

And if the firing of an animation? (Storyboard)

Thank you.

# re: Building a Silverlight LOB Application

Wednesday, May 04, 2011 6:21 PM by Deborah Kurata

Hi Eduardo -

I am writing a set of validation topics now. What I have so far you can find here:

msmvps.com/.../silverlight-ria-and-validation.aspx

The layout issue has several options:

1) You can pass the layout and adjust in the VM.

2) You can define properties that change the layout, bind those properties, and change the properties in the VM. (This is the one I try to do.)

3) Since layout changes are UI, you could modify it in the view. (This one is often not popular.)

Hope this helps.

# Some MVVM references

Wednesday, June 08, 2011 6:04 PM by A working programmer's mind

Some MVVM references

# re: Building a Silverlight LOB Application

Thursday, June 30, 2011 5:23 AM by Josie

Extremely helpful atircle, please write more.

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