In January and March 2009 I presented to the East Bay .NET and San Francisco Bay .NET user groups respectively on how to build business applications in Silverlight. The theme of the presentations was to show how developing line of business applications in Silverlight is extremely similar to other technologies like Win Forms, WPF or ASP.NET. I demoed how to build a simple CRUD application in Silverlight hitting a SQL Server database over WCF.
The building of the application during the presentation showed how to use the goodness of Silverlight and the other standard MSFT technologies to build a basic master detail CRUD application. Screen shot (as you can see it's VERY basic):
For the East Bay .NET use group in April I utilized SQL Server, LINQ to SQL and WCF. For the San Francisco Bay .NET user group I used SQL Server, Entity Framework and WCF.
The last part of the presentation demonstrated how to take the CRUD application built during the presentation and then migrate it into an MVVM architecture (i.e. zero code behind in the views and true separation of concerns) using techniques like attached behaviors in Silverlight and commanding.
The zipped up Power Point presentation and code from the San Francisco Bay .NET user group can be found here. In future posts I will walk through how to create the simple CRUD application and how to re-factor the code into MVVM by introducing attached behaviors and commanding.