Book Description

Microsoft Silverlight is a powerful development platform for creating rich media applications and line of business applications for the web and desktop. Silverlight enables you to create, customize and design rich enterprise dashboards that highlight Key Performance Indicators for your business.

Microsoft Silverlight 5: Building Rich Enterprise Dashboards is a concise and practical tutorial that shows you how to create, customize and design rich enterprise dashboards with Silverlight.

This book provides real world user experience design topics and starts by providing an overview of the Silverlight Platform and the clear advantages it provides for building dashboards. The book then dives into topics such as Silverlight design and development tools, building a basic Dashboard, Dashboard types and user needs, Designing for Insight, Styling, Building an End to End Dashboard Solution and Data Access Strategies amongst others.

What you will learn from this book

• Learn how to create custom user controls, reference resources, and edit basic control templates
• Build an end-to-end dashboard solution
• Learn how to use Microsoft Expression Blend to style a dashboard
• Explore the different types of dashboards, and learn how to choose the most appropriate dashboard type based on your project goals Download Now »

Book Description

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 offers you access to exciting new interactive and flexible Dashboards that contain any combination of Charts, Lists, iFrames and Silverlight components. These can be used to easily visualize your CRM data and provide you with a light BI interface, all of which this practical cookbook will enable you to utilize.

At first glance, Dashboards and their myriad information can be overwhelming to users that are new to the Dynamics CRM 2011 interface. This book guides you through navigating and interacting with Dashboards in a simple and easy to follow manner, and builds on that experience to walk you through creating and sharing your own User Dashboards.

“Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: Dashboards Cookbook” offers a range of practical recipes for mastering dashboard navigation, interaction, and building custom Dashboards in Dynamics CRM. You will immediately get to grips with essential tasks like changing Dashboard settings and sharing Dashboards with other members in the CRM team, as well as adding custom components like iFrames and Lists. Along the way you will also follow the creation of a simple HTML WebResouce that can be added to your Dashboard.

By the end of “Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: Dashboards Cookbook”, you will be fully equipped to take advantage of the exciting new Dashboards features of Dynamics CRM 2011.

What you will learn from this book
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Book Description

This book offers everything you’ll need to upgrade your existing programming knowledge and begin to develop applications for the Windows Phone.

It focuses on the 75 percent of the material that you will need 95 percent of the time. We’re not going to teach you object-oriented programming (OOP) all over again, but we are going to take the time to point out how .NET and C# differ in their execution of the standard OOP concepts from other languages’ implementations in order to make your migration as smooth and stress-free as possible.

Migrating to Windows Phone will lead you through a tour of the key features of developing for Microsoft’s devices. We’ll consider everything from data handling to accelerometers, from mapping to WCF. We’ll also walk you through monetizing your application through Microsoft’s online Windows Phone store.

What you’ll learn

• To get your phone, IDE and other tools set up in an efficient manner
• The controls that are available to you in Windows Phone programming and how they can be applied
• To apply concepts of a non-trivial demo application to your own application context
• To point out the key elements of both the phone and the Visual Studio IDE
• The principles of push and pull data and data-binding
• To work with the features that make the Windows Phone unique (Bing Maps, WCF, Silverlight)
• To monetize your applications through advertising Download Now »

Book Description

The Windows Phone 7 platform, now recently updated, provides a remarkable opportunity for Windows developers to create state-of-the-art mobile applications using their existing skills and a familiar toolset. Pro Windows Phone 7 Development, Second Edition helps you unlock the potential of this platform and create dazzling, visually rich, and highly functional applications for the Windows Phone Marketplace—including using new features like copy-and-paste and API improvements in the NoDo and Mango update waves.

For developers new to the Windows Phone platform—whether .NET, iPhone, or Android developers—this book starts by introducing the features and specifications of the Windows Phone series, and then leads you through the complete application development process. You’ll learn how to use Microsoft technologies like Silverlight, .NET, the XNA Framework, Visual Studio, and Expression Blend effectively, how to take advantage of the device’s sensors with the location service, accelerometer, and touch, how to make your apps location-aware using GPS data, how to utilize the rich media capabilities of the Windows Phone series, and much more. Finally, you’ll receive a full tutorial on how to publish and sell your application through the Windows Phone Marketplace. And in this second edition, learn quickly and easily how to take advantage of new API capabilities and HTML5 support right in your browser.

What you’ll learn

• The specifications and capabilities of the Windows Phone series and how to harness that power in your applications Download Now »

Book Description

Pro Reactive Extensions and LINQ is a deep dive into the next important technology for .NET developers: Reactive Extensions. This in-depth tutorial goes beyond what is available anywhere else to teach how to write WPF, Silverlight, and Windows Phone applications using the Reactive Extensions (Rx) to handle events and asynchronous method calls.

Reactive programming allows you to turn those aspects of your code that are currently imperative into something much more event-driven and flexible. For this reason, it’s sometimes referred to as LINQ for Events.

Reactive programming hinges on the concept of the observable collection, as opposed to the simple enumerable collection with which we’re all familiar. For example, to extract data from a collection and add it to a list box, you would traditionally iterate through the list box, extracting each object in turn. This approach works fine, but it requires significant knowledge about the data you’re working with, which can be limiting. In Rx programming, you’re instead informed about each object in turn and then free to react to each notification however you like, which affords much greater flexibility.

This book shows you how reactive programming can be applied to a range of situations—from WPF applications to Windows Phone apps—to improve coding efficiency and boost performance.

What you’ll learn

• How to create, debug and manage reactive extensions in many situations Download Now »

Book Description

A team of MVP authors guides you through the .NET 4 Framework

Written by a group of experienced MVPs, this unparalleled book delves into the intricate—and often daunting—world of .NET 4. Each author draws from a particular area of expertise to provide invaluable information on using the various .NET 4, C# 4, Silverlight 4, and Visual Studio tools in the real world. The authors break down the vast .NET 4 Framework into easily digestible portions to offer you a strong foundation on what makes .NET such a popular and successful framework for building a wide range of solutions.

• Breaks down the .NET 4 Framework into easily understandable sections
• Features more than a dozen MVPs serving as authors, each of whom focuses on a particular area of expertise
• Covers such topics as Windows Presentation Foundation, Silverlight 4, Windows Communication Foundation, ASP.NET performance, the entity framework, and more
• Shares C# tips and tricks and .NET architecture best practices from a team of Microsoft MVPs

Real World .NET 4 and C# is the ultimate resource for discovering and understanding the .NET 4 Framework.

From the Back Cover
Unparalleled advice for using the most popular tools of the .NET Framework Download Now »