Book Reviews

Review: "Silverlight 1.0 Unleashed"

Dave Noderer — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 11:44:59 GMT

Sams - ISBN-13: 978-0-672-33007-0 by Adam Nathan

This is a nice book in a number of ways... fairly short, limited scope, nice color pictures and full of great tips that could save you some time.

Adam covers the basics of Silverlight 1.0 which is pretty straight forward and will give you a good handle on what it does and does not do. Even though Silverlight 2.0+ is of more interest to most of us, this is a great way to start!

A bulk of the book is about basic XAML as implemented in Silverlight 1.0. If you are not familiar with WPF, this is a good tutorial on both drawing and events. If you are familiar with WPF in depth, a review of this material will show you where Silverlight is different.

An example of the tips, there are a lot of them in shaded boxes throughout the booik, are a pair of warnings.on pages 28 and 29 showing some of the quirks of the syntax where in the Silverlight.CreateObject. In particular the isWindowless must be specified true/false as a string "true" where as inplaceInstallPrompt must not be specified as a string.. true to work.

He also spends a lot of space on handling events, bubbling of events and some of the more suble "features". Although it makes perfect sense, the silverlight control must have focus to receive keystrokes. Only the root silverlight control can receive the gotfocus and lostfocus events.

Anyway a very nice book with lots of examples.

Now give me the CLR and some controls in Silverlight 2.0 and I'll be a happy camper!

Review: "ASP.NET AJAX in Action"

Dave Noderer — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 11:34:57 GMT

I've just finished reading asp.net Ajax in action by Alessandro Gallo, David Barkol and Rama Krishna Vavilala. ISBN-10: 1933988142

My philosophy about javascript can be summed up in one word "yuk!" I keep hoping that the need to learn javascript will pass as the tools catch up and extend the .net dev environment to the browser client. This is happening with much better tools for debugging and deploying javascript in vs 2008. Still i'm a curious person and am embarrased to admit how little javascript I know and use.

One thing this book gave me was a very good education on javascript and the very powerful engine built into all browsers and i'm walking away with a much better apprciation for what is there and how to use it. After reading the javascript chapter i'll no longer hesitate to use javascript where required.

On the AJAX front the book does a great job of explaining what the simple sever side Microsoft tools will and won't do and explains the events on the browser side in great detail. This is further expanded to describe the interaction with server side events. This all greatly expanded my knowledge of the page life cycle at the browser end.

All of the discussions are with detailed step by step examples in code which i liked a lot.

Great job guys!

Murach ASP.NET 2.0 Web Programming with VB 2005 - ISBN-13: 978-1-890774-32-5

Dave Noderer — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 11:58:02 GMT

This is a thick (819 pg not including the index) "Training and Reference" book by Anne Boehm and Doug Lowe.

If you are serious and especially if you are starting with only a little knowledge, going through this book and the examples from end to end will give you exposure for anything you might need to develop a website with .net.

It does not assume that you even know any html and goes through the basics of web page life and server interactions.

The book uses a shopping cart example and site to illustrate the various techniques using sql, gridview, formview, multiview, user controls, custom controls, authentication and personalization.

For anyone who is an experienced .net web developer, this will be pretty basic but it is filled with things used every day.

This is the first Murach book I have read and was pleased with what I found!