I just finished another chapter of Data Services with Silverlight 2. It’s a great feeling when this happens. There is always a bit of a slight pause afterwards though as I begin to realize how much more I have to write. For example, I finished a chapter on using RESTful services from Amazon to DSS2 cover - xlargecreate a Silverlight 2 based shopping application. Its a case study really … and it follows a chapter that discusses a primer of REST as it pertains to Silverlight 2, WebClient, HttpWebRequest, and many other issues. 

But as I finished these 2 chapters I am now going to dive into writing a chapter that shows how to build RESTful services that can be consumed by a Silverlight 2 application. This includes POSTs, Gets, Uri Templates, message formats, LINQ to JSON, and much more. To tie it all together I decided to build a RESTful service that interacts with Twitter’s RESTful API … and a Twitter client that I call SilverTwit that consumes both. So there is so much much more to go on the topic of REST and Silverlight 2. Oh, and then I still have to wrap up the Syndication and Astoria chapters. The good news is that I have created all of the chapter outlines, then I created the sample code, so the chapters just flow at this point. That’s why I can now write 10 pages in a day whereas before I was working on dozens of examples to base the book on.

My style is to discuss the topics and then demonstrate them in a case study like format while including the complete source code for the samples. I’ll put all of the code on the web site once I am done, in both VB and C# (thanks to Instant VB). Many of the examples can be expanded easily, and I hope people do take on that task.

But for tonight, I am just happy that another milestone is reached!

DotNetKicks Image