Silverlight book: Silverlight 4 User Interface Cookbook

Dear visitor: Please keep in mind that this post is originally from Vibor Cipan's personal blog, the name of which we eventually adopted as our company name together with its conveniently-named URL. We're keeping the posts on our official company blog for all the subscribers to Vibor's blog who have read and commented on his previous posts. Please be aware that this post represents Vibor's personal thinking few years ago and doesn't necessarily represent the opinions of the UX Passion as a company today. 

Are looking to build great user interfaces using 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 to the 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, our fruitful discussions and the ability to share with you has been 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 its webpage: Silverlight 4 User Interface Cookbook.

Content and order details

The 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 panes, split buttons and command link buttons
• What is and how to implement the 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 etc.) and star-based rating
• Using alternating row colors as a design technique for larger data set representation
• Using the pop-up window (in a good way)
• Making a 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 maps and geo-based UI controls
• Taking a step further with webcam and printing support
• Exploring 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 an 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 least – huge thanks and admiration go to my closest friends here at UX Passion 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 the best friends a man could ever ask for!

Giveaway and keeping in touch

Stay tuned – and be sure to follow me on Twitter – very soon I will give a 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 the 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 you found my book. I don’t plan to stop here with my book writing experience and that’s why your feedback would be so much appreciated.

Again, thanks and I hope you’ll enjoy the book!