Accelerated Silverlight 2

This book is only 330 pages long, each chapter averaging 22 pages, and yet, it packs a lot of good to excellent content, with each of the first 14 chapters providing the building-block information that would enable one to build what the author has called a real-world style application, the Campus Explorer discussed in the last chapter. While there is more to building real-world business applications than what the author had been able to address, the author hit all the right spots, showing readers how to: securely communicate with code deployed in same- or cross-domain servers to get application data, bind those data to user interfaces styled to mimick ASP.Net's Master and ContentPlaceHolder concepts, handle data-sharing, multithreading, and dynamic content-loading issues, test and debug application code including Automated UI Testing, and build, package and deploy application code. In addition to covering all the popular bread-and-butter concepts such as Data- and Control-Templating, Animation, and how to work with Audio and Video files, the book also includes good discussions of Visual State Manager (Chapter 8), Dynamic Language Support (Chapter 10) and an excellent discussion of how to use IsolatedStorageFile effectively. This book is very well written and organized, and delivers good to excellent contents efficiently. (Note: the source code for the book can be downloaded from the website mentioned at the end of the introduction, acceleratedsilverlight.net ).