Silverlight 4 Hands On Lab

Silverlight Data and Controls Series

• Silverlight 4 Hands On Lab
• Silverlight 4 using MVVM Pattern, RIA Services and Custom Domain Service
• Silverlight Custom Authentication Domain Service with RIA Services
• Binding ComboBox and AutoComplete Controls in Silverlight DataGrid
• RIA Service Domain Service Method Life-Cycle
• Silverlight Localization and Resource Files
• Deep Dive into Custom RIA Service and Transactions
• Bind a Silverlight DataGrid Column to the User Control DataContext
• Project RIA Methods
• Silverlight RIA Data Validation Best Practices

Hands On Lab for Silverlight 4

After the Mix 2010 Conference there has been a lot more excitement for Silverlight 4 and RIA Services. If you want to start to learn Silverlight 4 and RIA Services this is what I would recommend. First go the Silverlight website and review some of the learning materials there - there is a ton of good stuff there (http://www.silverlight.net/learn/).

However most of us require a more hands to actually learn something. I recently found that the Swiss MSDN Team published a very detailed Silverlight 4 Hands On lab here - http://blogs.msdn.com/swiss_dpe_team/archive/2010/01/19/hands-on-lab-silverlight-4-line-of-business-application-using-wcf-ria-services.aspx.

This lab is absolutely great in that is over 100 pages of step by step labs that taught me the following:

• How to create a Silverlight and RIA Service Project.
  
• Created a simple Entity Model and wired up a grid.
  
• Incorporated both Server and Client side filtering of data in the grid with RIA Services and LINQ.
  
• Added a Busy Indicator and DataPager controls to the grid.
  
• Added custom formatting and sorting to grid columns.
  
• Added an AutoComplete control to filter the grid.
  
• Added persistence to the grid to perform CRUD operations. Plus added concurrency checking to the grid.
  
• Created a data form for master and detail data to support for CRUD operations
  
• Implemented server side validation attributes to domain classes and created custom validation classes.
  
• Added custom lookups into the data form.
  
• Created a custom Data Transfer Object (DTO).
  
• Created custom domain methods.
  

There were several other labs which I did not complete on:

• New printing capabilities of Silverlight 4.
  
• Add right click menu items
  
• Using the clip board.
  
• Using COM Interop to send data to Excel.
  

Creating Lab Environment

I really found the labs a great way to learn Silverlight 4.

This lab was built for Silverlight 4 with Visual Studio Beta 2. As you know with the announcements at the Mix Conference, you can now use Silverlight 4 with Visual Studio 2010 RC. Plus a new RIA Service RC was also released. To get started doing this lab do the following:

• Follow instructions here to get your Silverlight 4 environment going with VS 2010 RC - http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2010/03/15/whats-new-in-silverlight-4-rc-mix10.aspx
  
• Download the Lab Materials - http://blogs.msdn.com/swiss_dpe_team/archive/2010/01/19/hands-on-lab-silverlight-4-line-of-business-application-using-wcf-ria-services.aspx
  

Modifications to Lab

Since this lab was published there have been some changes and not all things worked. There were a few small things that you will have to differently to complete the lab. This is because RIA Services RC release changed up several things.

Page 21 – Use System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Client instead of System.Windows.Ria. Reference - http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/RiaServices/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=3570

Page 41 – Use the following for Code Snippet 7 instead of what is provided:

<riaControls:DomainDataSource.QueryParameters>

<riaControls:Parameter ParameterName="city" Value="{Binding ElementName=shipCityBox, Path=Text}" />

</riaControls:DomainDataSource.QueryParameters>

References

• http://forums.silverlight.net/forums/p/155441/347438.aspx
  
• http://jeffhandley.com/archive/2010/03/15/filters-parameters.aspx?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+JeffHandley+(Jeff+Handley)
  

Page 45 - Data Conflict Detection – This section was seems to be out of place, skip it and complete later.

Page 63 - Snippet 12 – Need to modify the code slightly.

return new ValidationResult("Maximum freight cost for UK exceeded.", new string[] { "Freight" });