Silverlight 4 Resources - Free training course

Silverlight 4 Training

Microsoft is offering a free Silverlight 4 training course, great place to get started.

The Silverlight 4 Training Course includes a whitepaper explaining all of the new Silverlight 4 features, several hands-on-labs that explain the features, and a 8 unit course for building business applications with Silverlight 4. The business applications course includes 8 modules with extensive hands on labs as well as 25 accompanying videos that walk you through key aspects of building a business application with Silverlight. Key aspects in this course are working with numerous sandboxed and elevated out of browser features, the new RichTextBox control, implicit styling, webcam, drag and drop, multi touch, validation, authentication, MEF, WCF RIA Services, right mouse click, and much more!

You can download the course here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=24CEA29E-042E-41C9-AA16-684A0CA5F5DB&displaylang=en

You can also view the course at Channel 9 http://channel9.msdn.com/learn/courses/Silverlight4/

Course content:

What's New in Silverlight 4

Make this your first stop with Silverlight 4 and read or download the 60+ page whitepaper! Walk through the new features in Silverlight 4, find learning materials and additional resources. This covers all of the new business centric features, features for rich media experiences, Expression Blend and Visual Studio tooling enhancements, and new Out of Browser features!

Silverlight 4 New Features

Check out these 5 hands on labs that demonstrate some of the newest features in Silverlight. Explore multi touch, drag and drop, numerous out of browser features, learn to interact with the webcam, create a rich text notepad using the RichTextBox control, printing your content, and more!

Silverlight 4 Business Apps: Module 1 - Introduction Silverlight 4 Business Apps

John Papa and Ian Griffiths discuss the key areas that the Building Business Applications with Silverlight 4 course focuses on. This module is the overview of the course which covers many key scenarios that are faced when building business applications and how Silverlight can help address them.

Silverlight 4 Business Apps: Module 2 - Event Manager using WCF RIA Services

This is module 2 of the Building Business Applications with Silverlight 4 course. This module sets the stage with the course's Event Manager application. It discusses using WCF services vs WCF RIA Services. Then it walks you through integrating WCF RIA Services into the solution to support reading, editing and inserting entities. This unit also covers the key aspects of data binding and page navigation.

Silverlight 4 Business Apps: Module 3 - User Registration with Authentication, Validation, Rich Text, Styling, and Commands

User Registration with Authentication, Validation, Rich Text, Styling, and Commands This is module 3 of the Building Business Applications with Silverlight 4 course. This module covers authentication, using the DataForm, setting up validation for the model, the RichTextBox control, implicit styling, commanding, and the fundamentals of MVVM.

Silverlight 4 Business Apps: Module 4 - User Profile with Drop Target, Webcam, Clipboard

This is module 4 of the Building Business Applications with Silverlight 4 course. This module covers dropping a file onto a Silverlight application, programmatic clipboard access, and accessing the webcam.

Silverlight 4 Business Apps: Module 5 - Schedule Planner with Grouping and Right Click

This is module 5 of the Building Business Applications with Silverlight 4 course. This module covers grouping in a DataGrid and an ItemsControl. It also covers the new Fluid UI visual states, right mouse click, and word based text trimming.

Silverlight 4 Business Apps: Module 6 - Printing the Schedule

This is module 6 of the Building Business Applications with Silverlight 4 course. This module covers the fundamentals of printing in Silverlight. It also offers some techniques for printing multiple pages.

Silverlight 4 Business Apps: Module 7 - Event Dashboard Running Out of Browser

This module covers several out of browser features including creating toasts, window placement, elevated trust, and native integration.

Silverlight 4 Business Apps: Module 8 - Advanced Out of Browser and MEF

This module covers more out of browser features including creating custom chrome, the window closing event, silent installs, and XAP signing. It also covers MEF and how it enables composability, supports a plug in model, and can dynamically load XAP files.

MEF Managed Extensibility Framework - Resources

Note: The aim of this document is to gather information and resources, it is a living document, so feel free to add comments to add or update.. Content is extracted from sources, so I am just collecting information for everybody's reference. I will probably end up putting this in a wiki / codeplex but for administration is easier to start here.

MEF

Extensibility is a key design point for many applications such as the Microsoft Office applications with their plug-in model for extensibility. Silverlight 4 ships with a new framework, the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF), which provides a flexible way of building extensibility into your applications with capabilities for discovering and composing extensions at run-time in a dynamic and loosely-coupled way.

MEF can be found in .Net 4, Silverlight 4 and for Silverlight 3 in codeplex http://mef.codeplex.com/

Introduction

For an introduction of MEF you can start with this Presentation / Demo of Mike Taulty

In this demo-based session he takes a tour around MEF and look at its capabilities for building extensibility into your applications and also how it can be used in implementing the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern in Silverlight applications.

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/matthijs/Silverlight-4-A-Guided-Tour-of-the-Managed-Extensibility-Framework-MEF/

So why use MEF

Ten Reasons to use the Managed Extensibility Framework

Learning MEF

You can find in Channel 9 a video series to learn MEF, created also by Mike Taulty

http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/learnMEFSL4/

The video series include:

• MEF & Silverlight 4 Beta - Part 1, Introduction
• MEF & Silverlight 4 Beta - Part 2, Imports & Exports
• MEF & Silverlight 4 Beta - Part 3, Catalogs
• MEF & Silverlight 4 Beta - Part 4, Recomposition
• MEF & Silverlight 4 Beta - Part 5, the PackageCatalog
• MEF & Silverlight 4 Beta - Part 6, Locating Defaults & ExportProviders
  

You can take an step further and in this video Glenn Bloc shows how to use MEF to load and unload XAP files on demand.

Silverlight TV 11: Dynamically Loading XAPs with MEF

If you want to understand what is going on in the Framework you can also use the http://mefvisualizer.codeplex.com/ Mef Visualizer

Samples

In http://mef.codeplex.com/ you will find in the source code plenty samples to start with.

Supporting Frameworks

MEF Contrib

http://mefcontrib.codeplex.com/

In the MEF Contrib project you will find: A generic Catalog, Unity integration (this can become very handy if you are using PRISM), and Programming Models like Provider Model and Convention Model. You can read more in the Documentation and Features section.

PRISM and MEF

So what is the deal with PRISM and MEF? In PRISM 4 there will be full support / guidelines for MEF, you can read about here and here in the blogs of Glenn Bloc and Davil Hill.

In these blogs Jeremy Likness describes a good way to start on how to glue everything together

• PRISM, MEF and MVVM Part 1 of 3: Unity Glue
• PRISM, MEF, and MVVM Part 2 of 3: Making PRISM MEF Friendly

Or it also describes how you can use MEF instead of PRISM

• MEF instead of PRISM for Silverlight 3 Part 1 of 2: Dynamic Module Loading
• MEF instead of PRISM for Silverlight 3 Part 2 of 2: Region Management

Caliburn

There is another alternative to PRISM, you can use Caliburn as your framework of choice, which includes already MEF support.

Here is the current adapter source code.