We are making great progress in our Silverlight Exam series, we are now in the fourth part already. A quick look back on the previous parts shows that we started with a deep look at the layout and UI-related material. In the second part, we looked at enhancing the UI using features such as the Visual State Manager. In the previous part, the focus was mainly on the coding part, including topics such as dependency properties, the ICommand interface and working asynchronously with services. This fourth part will focus on a very important aspect: data. Not a single business application works without data and since one of the focus areas of Silverlight of LOB development, Silverlight is well-equipped to handle data. In this part, we’ll look at data binding, which is something you have to understand deeply. The data binding system is very powerful and enables the MVVM pattern. When working with data (mainly the input process), data needs to be validated as well. Silverlight 4 brings some new options, enabling a much cleaner way to perform validation on inputted data. For your convenience, the following list contains links to the other parts of the article series which have been finished already:
Part 4: Working with data As mentioned in the intro, many developers are using Silverlight to build business applications. And of course, business apps need to work with data: displaying data, accepting data input, validating input etc. While all this is very well possible to code manually (using code that looks like MyTextBlock.Text = person.FirstName), it’s prone to errors and gets tedious to write quickly. It’s certainly not the most exciting code to write, I think you’ll agree with me on that. Introducing data binding. It’s easily the most important topic to really grasp when learning Silverlight. The concept of data binding basically comes down to a construct that allows binding – or linking – properties of controls to properties of objects. Instead of having to write all that code manually however, the data binding engine takes a lot of the load out of our hands and lets us create binding from XAML. The data binding engine found in Silverlight is brought in from WPF. WPF’s version has still some more options, but the difference is getting smaller with every new release of Silverlight. Conceptually, data binding is nothing really new. We can do data binding in ASP.NET or WinForms as well; however the model in Silverlight (and WPF of course) is much more loosely coupled. Read more: Silverlight Show
- Laying Out a User Interface (15%)
- Enhancing the User Interface (14%)
- Implementing Application Logic (16%)
- Working with Data (17%) –> this part
- Interacting with a Host Platform (11%)
- Structuring Applications (13%)
- Deploying Applications (13%)
Part 4: Working with data As mentioned in the intro, many developers are using Silverlight to build business applications. And of course, business apps need to work with data: displaying data, accepting data input, validating input etc. While all this is very well possible to code manually (using code that looks like MyTextBlock.Text = person.FirstName), it’s prone to errors and gets tedious to write quickly. It’s certainly not the most exciting code to write, I think you’ll agree with me on that. Introducing data binding. It’s easily the most important topic to really grasp when learning Silverlight. The concept of data binding basically comes down to a construct that allows binding – or linking – properties of controls to properties of objects. Instead of having to write all that code manually however, the data binding engine takes a lot of the load out of our hands and lets us create binding from XAML. The data binding engine found in Silverlight is brought in from WPF. WPF’s version has still some more options, but the difference is getting smaller with every new release of Silverlight. Conceptually, data binding is nothing really new. We can do data binding in ASP.NET or WinForms as well; however the model in Silverlight (and WPF of course) is much more loosely coupled. Read more: Silverlight Show
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