Microsoft Silverlight 5: Building Rich Enterprise Dashboards

Table of Contents

• Preface

• Chapter 1: The Silverlight Technology
• What benefit does Silverlight bring to the table?
• XAML as a declarative programming model
• Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM)
• View First versus ViewModel First
• Dependency Injection (DI)
• Silverlight as a Web technology
• Asynchronous programming in Silverlight
• Silverlight features
• Client-side application development
• Reduced server load
• Client-side state
• Cross-browser development simplified
• Putting the pieces together
• Summary

• Chapter 2: Overview of Dashboards and Silverlight
• What are dashboards
• Purpose of dashboards
• Problems dashboards solve
• Current state of building dashboards
• When good just isn't good enough
• Why should we use Silverlight?
• Summary

• Chapter 3: Silverlight Design and Development Tools
• Blend strengths and weaknesses
• Visual Studio strengths and weaknesses
• Visual States
• Storyboards
• Sample Data
• Templates
• Visual Studio
• Debugging
• Developing for Silverlight
• Project Management
• Summary

• Chapter 4: Building a Basic Dashboard
• Creating a Silverlight Dashboard Application
• What is the MVVM pattern
• Building the Dashboard
• Setting up the Data Source
• Defining the View-Model and Model classes
• Laying out XAML and Data Binding
• Customizing the UI
• Summary

• Chapter 5: Dashboard Types and User Needs
• Different dashboards for different needs
• Strategic
• Analytical
• Operational
• The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly—typical dashboard charts and graphs
• Bar chart
• Pros
• Cons
• Stacked bar chart
• Pros
• Cons
• Line graph
• Pros
• Cons
• Scatterplot
• Pros
• Cons
• Bullet graph
• Pros
• Cons
• Sparkline
• Pros
• Cons
• Small multiples
• Pros
• Cons
• Pie chart
• Pros
• Cons
• Focusing on needs, not technology
• Representing and communicating user experience
• User-centered design
• User research
• Personas
• Scenarios
• Requirements
• Storyboards
• Sketches
• Wireframes
• Prototypes
• High-fidelity mockups
• Scenario-based requirements and design
• Example scenarios for dashboard design
• Summary

• Chapter 6: Designing for Insight
• Interaction aesthetics versus visual aesthetics
• Pre-attentive processing
• Applying pre-attentive processing to dashboard design
• Warnings about using pre-attentive attributes
• Scenario-based design of our dashboard
• Our initial overall dashboard wireframe
• Requirement 1
• Requirement 2
• Requirement 3
• Requirement 4
• Requirement 5
• Requirement 6
• Summary

• Chapter 7: Designing your Dashboard
• Knowing your tools
• Blend basics
• Assets
• Data
• Design View (Artboard)
• Objects and Timeline
• Parts
• Projects
• Properties
• Resources
• Results
• States
• Styling in Silverlight
• Referencing resources
• Implementing resources
• Creating a Button
• Exploring a Button's Control Template
• Adding Visual States (Visual State Manager)
• Converting Brushes to Resources
• Creating Resource Dictionaries
• Getting started with styling our Dashboard
• Creating a custom User Control in Blend
• Styling the Grid and Chart
• Summary

• Chapter 8: Building an End-to-End Solution
• Dashboard prerequisites
• Dashboard requirements
• Designing the solution
• Describing an N-Tier application design
• Sample project structure
• Setting up the Data Source
• Reviewing the database schema
• Stored procedures
• spTopUsInternetProducts
• spTopUsInternetCustomers
• spSalesByRegion
• spFinanceData
• Building the server components
• Domain Model (Shared Between Client and Server)
• Data Access Layer
• Building the WCF service
• Defining the presentation layer
• View and controls
• View Model
• Service Layer
• Summary

• Chapter 9: Data Access Strategies
• Data access overview
• Core networking classes
• Working with WebClient
• Using Fiddler
• Understanding network security
• Building services with Windows Communication Foundation
• Working with WCF
• The data access layer
• Building a SOAP service
• Building a REST service
• Exploring OData data services
• Building an OData service
• Consuming an external service
• Summary

• Chapter 10: Building Dashboards in SharePoint and Silverlight
• Overview of SharePoint
• Setting up SharePoint
• Building a Silverlight web part
• Using the Client Object Model
• Building a SharePoint Silverlight dashboard
• Setting up our data source
• Building our dashboard
• SharePoint Data Access Strategies
• Summary

• Index