MSDN Magazine - January 2009 - (Page 75)

S i lv e r l i g h t Build Line-Of-Business Enterprise Apps With Silverlight, Part 1 hanu Kommalapati When i presented an executive briefing on the business implications of Silverlight to a large company in Houston recently, the response was lukewarm. The cool demos that showcased DeepZoom, Picture-In-Picture and HD quality video, and high-quality animations should have easily excited the group. When I polled the audience members about their limited interest, it became clear that while dazzling graphics were great, there was very little real-world guidance available for building enterprise-quality, data-centric, line-of-business (LOB) applications with Silverlight. Today, enterprise-class applications require secure delivery of LOB information across network boundaries, often over the Internet, with role-based UI and data trimming applied for the business context. Running Silverlight on the client and the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 on the server supplies excellent capabilities for building such scalable and secure LOB applications. The lightweight Silverlight runtime running inside a sandbox provides framework libraries for integration with back-office data services. In order to build robust applications with Silverlight, architects and developers need to understand the Silverlight programming model and its framework features in the context of a real-world application. My main purpose in this article is to take an LOB scenario and build an application from the ground up, illustrating various aspects of Silverlight development along the way. The solution I’ll discuss is a call center application; its logical architecture is shown in Figure 1. In this installment, I will focus on screen pop notification, the asynchronous programming model, Silverlight dialog boxes, and cross-domain TCP policy server implementation. In Part 2, I will discuss application security, Web service integration, application partitioning, and a number of other aspects of the application. Silverlight Fundamentals: the CoreCLR Before I begin, let’s have a refresher of Silverlight fundamentals. First I’ll take a look inside the Silverlight runtime so you can get a better understanding of what’s possible with Silverlight. The CoreCLR is the virtual machine used by Silverlight. It’s similar to the CLR that powers the .NET Framework 2.0 and beyond and contains similar type-loading and garbage collection (GC) systems. this article discusses: • the Silverlight runtime environment • Silverlight asynchronous programming • Cross-domain policies • A sample enterprise application technologies discussed: Silverlight 2 Code download: code.msdn.microsoft.com/mag200901Silverlight January 2009 75 http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/mag200901Silverlight

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of MSDN Magazine - January 2009

Toolbox CLR Inside Out Basic Instincts Cutting Edge Test Run First Look� Geneva Framework Silverlight Windows Mobile Service Station Security Briefs Extreme ASP.NET Foundations .NET Matters { End Bracket }

MSDN Magazine - January 2009

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