Packt Publishing, the folks who published our Microsoft Silverlight 4 Business Application Development book have included some of the chapters of that book in a new mashup of their best selling Silverlight books. The new book is called Managing Media and Data in Microsoft Silverlight 4 and features great chapters from several different authors’ Silverlight books, covering the gambit from XAML and layouts to SharePoint integration to REST and RIA services.

In addition, they are also offering a discount on all Microsoft technology books during the month of May so be sure to check that out as well at Packt’s Microsoft Carnival!

Silverlight is still a great technology for business development, it eases deployment issues with distributed software, provides an interactive experience for users via a browser while maintaining the power of C# in the development life cycle.

A sample chapter for Silverlight 4 Business Application Development: Beginner’s Guide has posted a sample chapter online. Be sure to check it out, this will give a good idea of the flow of the book and how we get right down to details attempting to solve a real world problem.

You can purchase the book from the publisher and it is also available on Amazon.

The book that Frank and I wrote titled Silverlight 4 Business Application Development : Beginner's Guide has been published and is available! The book is targeted at those .NET developers who want to enter the realm of Silverlight development. The book will start you off coding right away and help get the concepts of Silverlight down so you can start building Rich Internet Applications for your company or clients.

With the release of Silverlight 4 RC the Windows Phone 7 developer tools I wanted to take a stab at building a Silverlight application for both the web and phone to see what kind of differences there are between the two. Except for the inability to use the ChildWindow I was able to build out controls and share them between the two applications. The main differences were in the MainPage.xaml that is created, along with the default styles, when you create a new Silverlight application for the web and Windows Phone 7. Of course,

I decided to create a game (called ShapeAttack) to see how it would perform on the phone emulator. Sad to say the performance on the emulator is very poor but I would imagine that it would be better on the physical device but as I do not own a Windows Phone 7 yet the emulator has to do for now. For that reason I would recommend doing this parallel type of development so you can actually test your application.

What I did was create all of the game code in UserControls, including the main game surface, then I linked the files from the standard Silverlight project into the phone project.

The game is very simple and kind of cheesy :D, just click on the shapes to destroy them. And of course you can download the source code for ShapeAttack(2.8MB) or play ShapeAttack online.

Andy Beaulieu has some helpful performance tips for Windows Phone 7 and Silverlight primarily focused on games of course.

Jeff Weber, the guy behind the Farseer Physics Engine, has posted an An Open Letter To Microsoft Regarding The Silverlight Game Development Community. I fully agree and want to add my voice in the request for an XNA-like community site!

From Jeff’s post:

“I hereby request, on behalf of all the future and present Silverlight game developers,  an awesome Silverlight game development portal along the lines of what exists for the XNA Creators Club Online community.”

Laurent Bugnion has discovered a bug in the Windows Phone 7 emulator when multi-threading and has posted a workaround:

Frank LaVigne has posted a very useful tool to download all of the MIX 10 session content.

Here is a video of the Pirates game: