Who This Book Is For

This book covers not just Silverlight as a technology but also the important concepts in designing and developing business applications. From structuring your application to actually implementing features, it covers the complete development life span for a business application in Silverlight.

To follow along with this book, you should know your way around Visual Studio well, have a reasonable degree of familiarity with C# and its features (such as generics and LINQ, although experience with a similar language such as Visual Basic or Java may suffice), be comfortable with designing and querying databases, and have a good understanding of object-oriented design (OOD). Some prior business application development experience (or understanding of what building a business application entails) is an advantage but isn't absolutely necessary, as I will discuss the reasoning behind many of the concepts unique to business application development as needed. However, you may need to refer to alternative sources for more information when the concepts are particularly complex and detailed. For example, a good understanding of design patterns (such as those described in the influential book Design Patterns, by the authors typically referred to as the Gang of Four [Addison-Wesley, 1994]) is important when designing business applications, but complete coverage of these in the context of designing Silverlight applications is really a whole book in its own right.