Deborah's Developer MindScape

One of the challenges of building a Silverlight line of business (LOB) application is getting the data from the business database. The business database resides on a server computer and the Silverlight application resides on each user’s computer. This post covers using Entity Framework (EF) to get the data from the database server to the […]

If you built a custom theme for your application (similar to this prior post) then you may find that your chart legend contents disappear. NOTE: This post is part of a series that starts with this prior post. The example in this post uses the application that is built as part of that series. The […]

Data visualization is often a requirement in today’s line of business (LOB) applications. Plus charts are just more fun to look at than data grids. Silverlight provides many different types of charts you can use to display the data in your LOB application. NOTE: This post is part of a series that starts with this […]

When binding to a DataGrid, in most cases you have a fixed number of columns and a variable number of rows. This post covers the case when you have a variable number of rows AND a variable number of columns. NOTE: This post is part of a series that starts with this prior post. The […]

Model View View/Model (MVVM) is an effective pattern for building Silverlight applications. It provides many useful benefits when building business applications with Silverlight. NOTE: This post is part of a series that starts with this prior post. The example in this post uses the application that is built as part of that series. MVVM requires […]

One of the common requirements of a line of business application is to present data. This post demonstrates the basics of how to populate a DataGrid from a business object. This post is a "stepping stone" to the ultimate goal of populating the DataGrid using MVVM, which is a later post in this series. NOTE: […]

So, you’ve started building a Silverlight Line of Business (LOB) application using the Silverlight Navigation Application template (as shown in this prior post). This post covers how to add pages to it. NOTE: This post is part of a series that starts with this prior post. 1) Add a new Page by right-clicking on the […]

If you want to give your line of business application a nice color theme and some basic interactive styles without a lot of work, you can use the built-in themes as described in this prior post. However, as shown in that prior post you may want to adjust or customize the theme. NOTE: This post […]

There are two ways to apply styles in a Silverlight application: explicit styles and implicit styles. The primary difference between them is that explicit styles have names (x:Key) and are applied to controls by their name. Implicit styles are not named and are applied to controls that don’t have an explicit style. A theme is […]

Many Line of Business (LOB) applications need to accomplish more than one objective. For example, a Student Management application may need to enter students, enter grades, and show student progress. NOTE: This post is part of a series that starts with this prior post. Though you could try putting all of this functionality on one […]