Silverlight book: Silverlight 4 User Interface Cookbook
Are looking how to build great user interfaces using the Silverlight 4? Do you need professional UX guidance for that? What about step-by-step instructions with code when you need it? I’m introducing you Silverlight 4 User Interface Cookbook. This is my first book and I’m proud to announce it to you here on UXPassion.com
Introduction
First of all, I must say how grateful I am to all visitors of this blog – your passion, fruitful discussions and ability to share with you was really inspiring.
Today, I’m happy to present you my first book – Silverlight 4 User Interface Cookbook.
I won’t go into too many details – I suggest you go and learn more about the book on the Silverlight Book webpage that my friends from the FatDUX Zagreb office have kindly prepared for me – Silverlight book: Silverlight 4 User Interface Cookbook.
Content and order details
Book contains 6 chapters and covers numerous patterns and approaches. Some of the things you will learn are:
- When to use and how to implement liquid versus fixed layouts
- How to build custom controls like navigation pane, split button and command link button
- What is and how to implement progressive disclosure technique for your UI
- Good design practices for patterns like wizards, tabs, status bar area and window locations
- Menu usage practices – classical ones and contextual ones together with guidelines
- Designing and implementing faceted navigation patterns, expanders, tiled sections, task panes and collapsible panels
- Using sample data generation and implementation of paging techniques for data-bound controls
- Designing and implementing time and date controls (calendars…) and star-based rating
- Using the alternating row colours as a design technique for larger data sets representation
- Using the pop-up window (in a good way)
- Making responsive UI and removing the visual noise from the interfaces
- Enabling full screen Silverlight experiences and escaping the browser with “out of the browser” experiences
- Adding and utilizing the maps and geo-based UI controls
- Taking a step further with webcam and printing support
- Exploring the exciting (pixel shader) effects for your images and controls
- Taking the ListBox control to new levels with animations and non-rectangular geometries.
So, if you are interested, you can find more information how to order Silverlight 4 User Interface Cookbook here.
Acknowledgments
As much as I know it sounds like a cliché, I need to thank certain people for helping me with this book and for being so supportive throughout the process. Apart from all those mentioned in the Acknowledgments part of the book, I must say and additional thank you to my publisher PACKT, to all technical reviewers there.
Huge thanks goes to Adam Kinney for writing a foreword for this book – Adam, it’s so much appreciated and your copy of the book will be on its way as soon as I get mine 
And last, but certainly not the least – huge thanks and admiration goes to my closest friends here at FatDUX Zagreb who were so full of patience and support, who were giving me all the time I needed to finalize my book and taking care of our clients and smooth business operations – Antun Debak and Darko Čengija. You guys are best friends man can ever ask for!
Giveaway and keeping in touch
Stay tuned – and be sure to follow me on Twitter – very soon I will give free, signed copy of my Silverlight 4 User Interface coobook to the luckiest reader / Twitter follower.
Also, I’d be happy to hear all your comments, ideas, suggestions regarding this book. Yes – it is my first book, it’s actually first book ever made available dealing exclusively with Silverlight and UI / UX matters and often, while I was writing it, I needed to make certain decisions and take certain approaches. I did my best to make sure they are good but things are changing and I’d love to hear from you how did you find my book. I don’t plan to stop here with my book writing experience and that’s why you feedback would be so much appreciated.
Again, thanks and I hope you’ll enjoy the book!
21 Responses to “ Silverlight book: Silverlight 4 User Interface Cookbook ”
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- Vibor Cipan
- Thomas Martinsen
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- Dew Drop – September 6, 2010 | Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew
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- the rasx() context » Blog Archive » “How to distribute a Silverlight OOB Application?” and other Google Starred Items…
I have been learning Silverlight. Designing the interfaces has always been a nightmare for me.. I think this would be of good help to me.
Thanks, I hope it will help you! And also, feel free to ask here as well if there’s anything I can do to help
Well, since there seems to be no other way to contact you, I will use the comments:
I just bought your book at PACKT Publishing and I got two problems with the order. 1st you wrote, that the book would be in ePub format, which it isn’t. It’s PDF and I can’t use it. 2nd they wrote the bill to be €26.34, but charged me €30.99 using PayPal (the forgot the discount).
Any help would be great.
Thanks
Jens
Hello Jens,
As you can probably know I have no role at all regarding the pricing. What I will do, with your permission, is to send my publisher this information together with your email address and I hope they will be able to solve this for you. Please, let me know if that’s fine with you on my email vcATfatduxDOTcom
Many thanks for buying my book – and let’s see how we can solve this issue you have encountered.
Cheers,
Vibor
You had some nice points here. I accomplished a study on the topic and got most peoples will agree with your webpage.
When will the source code for the book be available?