It’s very easy to say that ” I loved reading Pro Silverlight 3 in C#
book and worth my time and money”. The book is very easy to read. All the chapters are arranged systematically, that way it’s easy for readers at every level. It starts with explaining the history of Silverlight and slowly introduces all the basic concepts necessary to develop Silverlight applications.
I loved that the author has a “What’s New” sections wherever applicable, that way for people like me who is upgrading their skills from Silverlight 2 can jump to those areas if they are only interested in the new features of Silverlight. As far as the depth, the author has done a very good job of explaining all the important concepts and almost all the controls available out of the box and controls available in Silverlight Toolkit.
What I liked is that the author also mentions the limitations if any or cautions and because I have implemented multiple projects in Silverlight, I can tell that all those tips , cautions and Notes can save you lot of time and frustration. For example, the mouse wheel event only fires in IE and not in other browsers or how to handle exceptions at an application level and how VS handles them when you are in debug mode vs. release mode. Those types of tips are very useful when implementing a feature and when you put the app in productions.
All the new features like Out of Browser, Navigation are discussed. Individual chapters are dedicated to Animation and Sound, Video and Deep Zoom to go deep in these areas which was very useful for me personally.
.NET Ria Services is slightly touched, not in depth as its relatively new which can be slightly disappointing for those who want to learn about it .Data Annotations and Data Validation for the forms and other Data Controls are discussed in depth.
I wished the author has talked a little bit more about Rest Services as the web Client has some limitations in areas of REST, Frameworks like Prism and Caliburn and Commonly used design patterns like MVVM and other TDD best practices in context of Silverlight.
For that reason, I would say that this book is more suitable for entry level to mid level Silverlight developers. But if you are completely new to Silverlight or just touched few areas in developing Silverlight, I seriously recommend this book to get strong in all core areas of developing Silverlight applications.
No comments:
Post a Comment