Extending Microsoft SharePoint Solutions with Silverlight 3 — A 3-Day Course

 Open Public Course Closed In-House Course

Course Synopsis

This is an instructor-led course, emphasising hands-on experience via self-guided exercises at the end of each module. The course begins by introducing Silverlight, beginning from the very basics of XAML and Expression Blend, working through to designing the user experience, and finally on to data binding and network access. The introduction to Silverlight ends by examining how Silverlight can interact with the web page which hosts it.

We will also introduce some of the many controls which are available for Silverlight, including the Bing Maps control, the Silverlight Toolkit Chart controls, and the Timeline control.

The course then turns to SharePoint, providing a quick recap of SharePoint development and an introduction to the new features of SharePoint 2010. Developers who wish to work with SharePoint 2007 will see how to enable Silverlight applications to work in that version of SharePoint, and how to create a web part that can host Silverlight applications. Developers who wish to work with SharePoint 2010 will discover that those features are already present, and will examine the new functionality of the SharePoint 2010 interface.

Finally, the last exercise of the course brings together all of the previous material to create a Silverlight application which can be hosted in SharePoint, and which uses the available SharePoint API (2007 or 2010) to access the data available in SharePoint. This application will retrieve data from SharePoint lists and SQL Server databases, and display it in a multiple-panel format using maps, charts and lists.

Delegates are free to complete the exercise material using either MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) 2007 or SharePoint Server 2010, and to develop in either C# or VB.NET.

Intended Audience

This course is designed for both SharePoint 2007 and 2010 developers who wish to integrate Silverlight 3 into a SharePoint solution. The course assumes no prior knowledge of Silverlight.

Course Prerequisites

Delegates should have a background in .NET development using either C# or VB.NET, and should also have experience developing custom SharePoint 2007 features using Visual Studio.

Delegates need not have any prior knowledge of Silverlight at all.

Publicly scheduled dates, locations, and prices

Course Contents

Introduction to Silverlight

• Brief introduction to Silverlight and Expression Blend
• Key concepts in Silverlight

Designing with Silverlight

• The importance of User Experience
• Additional Silverlight controls: Silverlight Toolkit, Bing Maps, Timeline, Blacklight
• Customising Silverlight controls
• Styles, Resources and Templates
• States and Transitions

Silverlight and External Data

• Data bindings: one-way and two-way
• Property change notifications
• Creating Silverlight-enabled WCF Services
• Network access from Silverlight
• Cross-domain access

Interacting with Silverlight

• The Application object
• InitParams and the Silverlight plugin
• Accessing the browser from Silverlight
• Accessing Silverlight from JavaScript

Introduction to SharePoint

• Recap of SharePoint development and developer tools
• Integrating Silverlight with SharePoint 2007
• Creating a Silverlight Web Part in SharePoint 2007
• What's new in SharePoint 2010

Accessing List Data in Silverlight

• Setting up and deploying a SharePoint/Silverlight project
• Accessing Lists.asmx and parsing the results using LINQ to XML (SharePoint 2007)
• Accessing ListData.svc via the Client Object Model (SharePoint 2010)

Integrating SharePoint and Silverlight

• Bringing together all the concepts from the previous modules