Microsoft Silverlight Books

Amazing Silverlight 3 Reference

Laurence Moroney has pulled off another successful book to follow his fantastic works in "Introducing Silverlight 1.0" and "Silverlight 2".

"Introducing Silverlight 3" is a great reference for learning the newest features of Silverlight 3 Beta. The book content is easy to follow along and gives a variety of examples that help to rapidly learn Silverlight 3.

Some of the sections that I enjoyed include the SketchFlow tutorial and the DRM section. The Connected Applications chapter helped me to develop my first Silverlight application with Web Services in no time.

I highly recommend the book for training and reference purposes.

Umesh Patel
20 July, 2009

REVIEWED BY: Ian Smith, CTO of Irascian Ltd

Laurence Moroney's Introducing Microsoft Silverlight 3 book, published by Microsoft Press, and already in stores despite no date for even a 'Go live' license for this technology having been announced. In its favour it does highlight the fact that it is 'Based on' a beta on the cover. This appears along with a promise that updates will be available online. Given my previous experience of such empty promises and - forgive my cynicism - the fact the author's last blog update was back in March, I'm not entirely convinced the promise is anything more than the usual empty guff designed to encourage you to part with an outrageously high asking price of 40 dollars. Like I said, I'm bitter after my WCF experiences in this area (where one author even stopped comments on his blog to avoid addressing the issue of having sold a book and downloadable code samples that never worked!)

I would argue that Introducing Silverlight 3 is not so much a book, as an extended marketing brochure for the technology, written by someone obviously so busy in his day job he just didn't have the time required to put together AND PROOF-READ/TEST an introductory book like this. It's effectively an extended marketing brochure that you're expected to pay 40 dollars for! I could, and perhaps should, forgive it such sins. After all the title and the Microsoft Press record on these things pretty much gives the game away. But when the book contains so many inconsistencies, errors and lack of anything approaching appropriate instruction for a beginner I feel it's justified as the target for a full-on rant masquerading as a blog entry! ;-)

First, I should probably justify my 'it's a marketing brochure masquerading as a book' comment. Well, here's the book explaining the new 'Code Behind' feature of Blend 3

You can also edit the code-behind with Expression Blend 3, a new feature that wasn't available in previous versions. For example, originally the text block in Figure 1-6 had no name set. You can change this to txtHello and then open the Page.xaml.cs file.

Fair enough, you might think. But where does the author explain HOW to do this? He doesn't! He moves onto some other subject in the next paragraph. The book is too much 'you can' not 'you do'. Given the fat volume's 356 page count I'd expected rather more, but with each sentence being presented as a new paragraph (I reformatted the above italicised snippet from two different paragraphs) it's not hard to see how the seemingly high page count and volume thickness has been achieved.

I could perhaps forgive the lack of real 'meat' if what little meat that was presented wasn't so obviously out-of-date - even at this early stage where we're still in beta and not all changes to the core product have been made! But any newbie is going to get totally confused by the so-called explanations that permeate this book. The author is in a permanent state of confusion about whether the default page created in the simplest application is called Page, MainPage or MainControl!

Did ANYBODY bother proof-reading this book? (that's a rhetorical question, as it's obvious within minutes of starting to read it that the answer is most definitely 'No'!)

Even the most rudimentary code block appears to have been published unchecked. You want an example don't you?! One of the first code snippets shows what gets generated for you automatically in your application. It has four lines showing the auto-generated class MainPage that works for you in a default application. Which is pretty neat given that it shows the class's constructor is called Page!

Suffice to say, if you're excited about the upcoming release of Silverlight 3 (and you should be!) then the best thing to do is wait for books based on the reality of the product to be released after the release date, not this sham of a cynical exercise in making money (or over-hyping 'free book' chapter extract giveaways at costly conferences!) by exploting the current buzz around the new technology.

- irascianwork. blogspot. com

K. Kumar
02 July, 2009

Not that bad...

First let me confess this book recently came to me as a freebie. With that disclaimer out of the way...

This isn't for the seasoned Silverlight 2.0 developer. It is more of an eclectic collection of ideas that might interest someone curious about one of Microsoft's latest big toys. For example, I've not seen too many authors mixing up Silverlight and functional programming.


Another Reader
08 December, 2009