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Get the definitive guide on designing applications on the Microsoft application platform—straight from the Microsoft patterns & practices team. Learn how to choose the most appropriate architecture and the best implementation technologies that the Microsoft application platform offers applications developers. Get critical design recommendations and guidelines organized by application type—from Web, mobile, and rich Internet applications to Office Business Applications. You’ll also get links to additional technical resources that can help with your application development.

Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) provides the foundation for building applications and high-quality user experiences for the Windows operating system. It blends the application user interface, documents, and media content, while exploiting the full power of your computer's operating system.

Its functionality extends to the support for tablet PCs and other forms of input device, and it provides a more modern imaging and printing pipeline, accessibility and UI automation infrastructure, data-driven user interfaces and visualization, and integration points for weaving the application experience into the Windows shell.

This book shows you how WPF really works. It provides you with the no-nonsense, practical advice that you need in order to build high-quality WPF applications quickly and easily. After giving you a firm foundation, it goes on to explore the more advance aspects of WPF and how they relate to the others elements of the .NET 4.0 platform and associated technologies such as Silverlight.

What you’ll learn

• WPF basics: XAML, layout, control essentials, and data flow
• WPF applications: Navigation, commands, localization, and deployment
• Advanced controls: Custom controls, menus, toolbars, and trees
• WPF documents: Text layout, printing, and document packaging
• Graphics and multimedia: Drawing shapes, sound and video, animation, geometric transformations, and imaging

Who this book is for

This book is designed for developers encountering WPF for the first time in their professional lives. A working knowledge of C# and the basic architecture of .NET is helpful to follow the examples easily, but all concepts will be explained from the ground up.

Table of Contents

1. Introducing WPF
2. XAML
3. Layout
4. Dependency Properties
5. Routed Events
6. Controls
7. The Application
8. Element Binding
9. Commands
10. Resources
11. Styles and Behaviors
12. Shapes, Brushes, and Transforms
13. Geometries and Drawings
14. Effects and Visuals
15. Animation Basics
16. Advanced Animation
17. Control Templates
18. Custom Elements
19. Data Binding
20. Formatting Bound Data
21. Data Views
22. Lists, Trees, and Grids
23. Windows
24. Pages and Navigation
25. Menus, Toolbars, and Ribbons
26. Sound and Video
27. 3-D Drawing
28. Documents
29. Printing
30. Interacting with Windows Forms
31. Multithreading
32. The Add-in Model
33. ClickOnce Deployment

ASP.NET 3.5 is Microsoft’s revolutionary ASP.NET technology. It is the principal standard for creating dynamic web pages on the Windows platform. Pro ASP.NET 3.5 in C# 2008 raises the bar for high–quality, practical advice on learning and deploying Microsoft’s dynamic web solution.

Seasoned .NET professionals Matthew MacDonald and Mario Szpuszta explain how you can get the most from this groundbreaking technology. They cover ASP.NET 3.5 as a whole, illustrating both the brand–new features and the functionality carried over from previous versions of ASP. This book will give you the knowledge you need to code real ASP.NET 3.5 applications in the best possible style.

The only real tool for developing cross-platform rich Internet applications (RIAs) for that last 11 years has been Flash; until now! Silverlight 3 allows you to develop cross-platform rich Internet applications in a fraction of the time because of the extensive and very powerful .NET 3.5 libraries, the powerful, design friendly Blend 3 IDE, and an enhanced workflow that allows designers and developers to work on the same set of files at the same time.

• Develop stunning RIAs in a short time.
• Learn some basic object-oriented programming principles.
• Get familiar with the Blend 3 development environment.

What you’ll learn

• Learn the Blend 3 and Visual Studio 2008 IDEs.
• Learn how to create stunning animations using Silverlight 3 Storyboards.
• Learn how to incorporate video and sound into your RIAs with the Silverlight MediaElement.
• Learn about and how to develop quickly using Silverlight 3's reusable resources such as UserControls, ControlTemplates and DataTemplates.
• Learn about the new Visual State Manager and the State panel in Blend 3 to quickly and easily add MouseEnter and MouseLeave states to your UserControls.
• Put everything you have learned together to create a sample Silverlight 3 website.

Who this book is for

Web designers and developers wanting to learn Expression Blend 3 from the ground up. Those who have a background in the development of RIAs and want to learn this technology.

Table of Contents

1. Setting Up the Silverlight Development Environment
2. The Blend 3 Integrated Development Environment
3. C#, XAML, and Object-Oriented Programming
4. Controls
5. Storyboards
6. Using the VSM and Blend 3’s States Panel to Create a Silverlight Media Player
7. The Silverlight MediaElement
8. The WPF Toolkit
9. Events and EventHandlers
10. Classes and Interfaces
11. ControlTemplates, Styles, and Custom UserControls
12. Writing a Custom Content Panel
13. Building a Sketchflow Prototype
14. Putting Everything Together to Build a Sample Silverlight Website

Create rich, flexible, and maintainable line-of-business applications with the MVVM design pattern

Simplify and improve business application development by applying the MVVM pattern to Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Microsoft® Silverlight® 4. With this hands-on guide, you'll use MVVM with data binding, commands, and behaviors to create user interfaces loosely coupled to business logic. MVVM is ideal for .NET developers working with WPF and Silverlight—whether or not you have experience building enterprise applications.

Discover how to:

• Dive deep into MVVM—and learn how it differs from other UI design patterns
• Build a simple Customer Relationship Management application you can adapt for your own projects
• Implement MVVM to maintain separation between UI declarative syntax and presentation logic code
• Create a Domain Model to define your application’s business context
• Write dynamic code for the data access layer with the Microsoft Entity Framework and NHibernate
• Enforce complex data-validation scenarios using Windows Workflow Foundation 4
• Implement MVVM using frameworks and toolkits such as Microsoft Prism

Get code samples on the web
For system requirements, see the Introduction.

Professional-level prep for the professional-level exam.

Prepare for MCPD Exam 70-518—and help demonstrate your real-world mastery of Windows application design and development with .NET Framework 4. Designed for experienced, MCTS-certified professionals ready to advance their status—Exam Ref focuses on the critical-thinking and decision-making acumen needed for success at the MCPD level.

Focus on the expertise measured by these objectives:

• Designing the Layers of a Solution
• Designing the Presentation Layer
• Designing the Data Access Layer
• Planning a Solution Deployment
• Designing for Stability and Maintenance

This book was written to introduce you to the features and capabilities that ASP.NET 3.5 offers, as well as to give you an explanation of the foundation that ASP.NET provides. We assume you have a general understanding of Web technologies, such as previous versions of ASP.NET, Active Server Pages 2.0/3.0, or JavaServer Pages. If you understand the basics of Web programming, you should not have much trouble following along with this book's content.

If you are brand new to ASP.NET, be sure to check out Beginning ASP.NET 3.5: In C# and VB by Imar Spaanjaars (Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2008) to help you understand the basics.

In addition to working with Web technologies, we also assume that you understand basic programming constructs, such as variables, For Each loops, and object-oriented programming.

You may also be wondering whether this book is for the Visual Basic developer or the C# developer. We are happy to say that it is for both! When the code differs substantially, this book provides examples in both VB and C#.

This book spends its time reviewing the 3.5 release of ASP.NET. Each major new feature included in ASP.NET 3.5 is covered in detail. The following list tells you something about the content of each chapter.

• Chapter 1, "Application and Page Frameworks." This chapter shows you how to build ASP.NET applications using IIS or the built-in Web server that comes with Visual Studio 2008. This chapter also shows you the folders and files that are part of ASP.NET. It discusses ways to compile code and shows you how to perform cross-page posting. This chapter ends by showing you easy ways to deal with your classes from within Visual Studio 2008.

• Chapters 2, 3, and 4.These three chapters are grouped here because they all deal with server controls. This batch of chapters starts by examining the idea of the server control and its pivotal role in ASP.NET development. In addition to looking at the server control framework, these chapters delve into the plethora of server controls that are at your disposal for ASP.NET development projects.

• Chapter 5, "Working with Master Pages."Master pages are a great capability found in ASP.NET. They provide a means of creating templated pages that enable you to work with the entire application, as opposed to single pages.

• Chapter 6, "Themes and Skins.” This chapter looks at how to deal with the styles that your applications require and shows you how to create a centrally managed look-and-feel for all the pages of your application by using themes and the skin files that are part of a theme.

• Chapter 7, "Data Binding in ASP.NET 3.5.” One of the more important tasks of ASP.NET is presenting data, and this chapter shows you how to do that with ASP.NET controls.

• Chapter 8, "Data Management with ADO.NET.” This chapter presents the ADO.NET data model provided by ASP.NET, which allows you to handle the retrieval, updating, and deleting of data quickly and logically.

• Chapter 9, "Querying with LINQ." LINQ is a set of extensions to the .NET Framework that encompass language-integrated query, set, and transform operations. This chapter introduces you to LINQ and how to use this new feature in web applications today.

• Chapter 10, "Working with XML and LINQ to XML." This chapter looks at the XML technologies built into ASP.NET and the underlying .NET Framework to help you easily extract, create, manipulate, and store XML..

• Chapter 11, "IIS7." Probably the most substantial release of IIS in its history, IIS 7.0 will change the way you host and work with your ASP.NET applications.

• Chapter 12, "Introduction to the Provider Model." A number of systems are built into ASP.NET that make the lives of developers so much easier and more productive than ever before. These systems are built upon an architecture called a provider model, which is rather extensible. This chapter gives an overview of this provider model and how it is used throughout ASP.NET 3.5.

• Chapter 13, "Extending the Provider Model." This chapter looks at some of the ways to extend the provider model found in ASP.NET 3.5. This chapter also reviews a couple of sample extensions to the provider model.

• Chapter 14, "Site Navigation." Many developers do not simply develop single pages—they build applications. One of the application capabilities provided by ASP.NET 3.5 is the site navigation system covered in this chapter.

• Chapter 15, "Personalization.". The ASP.NET team developed a way to store end user information—the ASP.NET personalization system.

• Chapter 16, "Membership and Role Management." This chapter covers the membership and role management system developed to simplify adding authentication and authorization to your ASP.NET applications. This chapter focuses on using the web.config file for controlling how these systems are applied, as well as on the server controls that work with the underlying systems.

• Chapter 17, "Portal Frameworks and Web Parts." This chapter explains Web Parts—a way of encapsulating pages into smaller and more manageable objects.

• Chapter 18, "HTML and CSS Design with ASP.NET." A lot of focus on building a CSS-based Web application was placed on Visual Studio 2008. This chapter takes a close look at how you can effectively work with HTML and CSS design for your ASP.NET applications.

• Chapter 19, "ASP.NET AJAX."AJAX signifies the capability to build applications that make use of the XMLHttpRequest object. New to Visual Studio 2008 is the ability to build AJAX-enabled ASP.NET applications from the default install of the IDE.

• Chapter 20, "ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit." This chapter takes a good look at the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, a series of new controls that are now available to make AJAX web development rather simple.

• Chapter 21, "Security." This security chapter discusses security beyond the membership and role management features provided by ASP.NET 3.5. This chapter provides an in-depth look at the authentication and authorization mechanics inherent in the ASP.NET technology, as well as HTTP access types and impersonations.

• Chapter 22, "State Management." Because ASP.NET is a request-response–based technology, state management and the performance of requests and responses take on significant importance. This chapter introduces these two separate but important areas of ASP.NET development.

• Chapter 23 , "Caching." Because of the request-response nature of ASP.NET, caching on the server becomes important to the performance of your ASP.NET applications. This chapter looks at some of the advanced caching capabilities provided by ASP.NET, including the SQL cache invalidation feature which is part of ASP.NET 3.5.

• Chapter 24, "Debugging and Error Handling." This chapter tells you how to properly structure error handling within your applications. It also shows you how to use various debugging techniques to find errors that your applications might contain.

• Chapter 25, "File I/O and Streams." More often than not, you want your ASP.NET applications to work with items that are outside the base application. This chapter takes a close look at working with various file types and streams that might come into your ASP.NET applications.

• Chapter 26, "User and Server Controls." This chapter describes building your own server controls and how to use them within your applications.

• Chapter 27, "Modules and Handlers." This chapter looks at two methods of manipulating the way ASP.NET processes HTTP requests: HttpModule and HttpHandler. Each method provides a unique level of access to the underlying processing of ASP.NET and can be powerful tools for creating web applications.

• Chapter 28, "Using Business Objects." You are going to have components created with previous technologies that you do not want to rebuild but that you do want to integrate into new ASP.NET applications. Beyond showing you how to integrate your COM components into your applications, this chapter shows you how to build newer style .NET components instead of turning to the previous COM component architecture.

• Chapter 29, "Building and Consuming Services." This chapter reveals the ease not only of building XML Web services, but consuming them in an ASP.NET application. This chapter then ventures further by describing how to build XML Web services that utilize SOAP headers and how to consume this particular type of service.

• Chapter 30, "Localization." ASP.NET provides an outstanding way to address the internationalization of Web applications. This chapter looks at some of the important items to consider when building your Web applications for the world.

• Chapter 31, "Configuration." This chapter teaches you to modify the capabilities and behaviors of ASP.NET using the various configuration files at your disposal.

• Chapter 32, "Instrumentation." The ASP.NET framework includes performance counters, the capability to work with the Windows Event Tracing system, possibilities for application tracing , and the most exciting part of this discussion—a health monitoring system that allows you to log a number of different events over an application's lifetime.

• Chapter 33, "Administration and Management." This chapter provides an overview of the new GUI tools that come with APS.NET that enable you to manage your Web applications easily and effectively.

• Chapter 34, "Packaging and Deploying ASP.NET Applications." This chapter takes the application building process one-step further and shows you how to package your ASP.NET applications for easy deployment.

• Appendix A, "Migrating Older ASP.NET Projects." This appendix focuses on migrating ASP.NET 1.x, or 2.0 applications to the 3.5 framework.

• Appendix B, "ASP.NET Ultimate Tools." Based on Scott Hanse...

A unique resource that combines all aspects of Web testing and makes it completely specific to ASP.NET

As Microsoft's key Web technology for creating dynamic, data-driven Web sites and Web applications, ASP.NET is incredibly popular. This is the first book to combine several testing topics and make them specific to ASP.NET. The author duo of Microsoft MVPs covers both the test-driven development approach and the specifics of automated user interface testing; performance, load, and stress testing; accessibility testing; and security testing.

This definitive guide walks you through the many testing pitfalls you might experience when developing ASP.NET applications. The authors explain the fundamental concepts of testing and demystify all the correct actions you need to consider and the tools that are available so that you may successfully text your application.

• Author duo of Microsoft MVPs offer a unique resource: a combination of several testing topics and making them specific to ASP.NET, Microsoft's key Web technology for creating dynamic, data-driven Web sites and applications
• Guides you through the many testing pitfalls you may experience when developing ASP.NET applications
• Reviews the fundamental concepts of testing and walks you through the various tools and techniques available and for successfully testing an application
• Discusses several different types of testing: acceptance, stress, accessibility, and security
• Examines various testing tools, such as nUnit, VS test suite, WCAT, Selenium, Fiddler, Firebug, and more

This one-of-a-kind resource will help you become proficient in successfull application testing.

NOTE: This book is the printed, Silverlight-focused edition of Programming Windows Phone 7, which is available as a free eBook from the Microsoft Download Center. A Microsoft XNA®-focused edition is also available for sale in print (ISBN 978-0-7356-5669-7). The Microsoft eBook covers both Silverlight and XNA in one volume.
Bring your app ideas to life—with guidance from a Windows programming legend
Get started building your own apps and utilities for Windows Phone 7—expertly guided by award-winning author Charles Petzold. Focusing on Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 and the C# language, you’ll learn how to extend your existing skills to this new mobile platform—mastering the core tools and techniques you need to get productive quickly. As always, Charles brings a unique combination of pragmatism and inspiration to his instruction—along with a wealth of hands-on examples.

Discover how to:

• Customize page navigation and layout
• Know when to use code vs. XAML markup
• Capture and embed bitmaps, balancing performance issues
• Support multi-touch input—including tap, drag, flick, and pinch
• Work with accelerometer and location services
• Experiment with panoramic and pivot controls
• Create effects using built-in or custom animations
• Manage state, tombstoning, data-binding, and storage
• Write your own templates and custom controls
• Test-drive your app on Windows Phone Emulator

Get code samples on the Web

• For system requirements, see the Introduction.

Do you want to create .NET applications that provide high performance and scalability? Do you want to employ object–oriented programming techniques in a distributed environment? Do you want to maximize the reuse and maintainability of your code? Then this book is for you.

In Rockford Lhotka’s Expert C# 2008 Business Objects, you’ll learn how to use advanced .NET Framework capabilities alongside object-oriented design and programming to create scalable, maintainable object–oriented applications. Better still, this book includes Component-based Scalable Logical Architecture (CSLA) .NET 3.6, a widely-used framework on which you can base your application development. By using the concepts and framework in the book, you can focus more on your business issues and less on technology.

Using VS 2008 and C# 3.0, Rockford Lhotka shows you how CSLA .NET 3.6 allows great flexibility in object persistence, so business objects can use virtually any data sources available. The CSLA framework supports 1–, 2– and n–tier models through the concept of mobile objects. This provides the flexibility to optimize performance, scalability, security, and fault tolerance with no changes to code in the UI or business objects.

Business objects based on CSLA.NET 3.6 automatically gain many advanced features that simplify the creation of Windows forms, web forms, WPF, WCF, WF, and web services interfaces, and LINQ.

What you’ll learnWho this book is for

This book is for .NET developers using Visual Studio 2008 who want to create .NET applications that provide high performance and scalability, employing object–oriented programming techniques in a distributed environment.