Foreword

When I was first approached to write the foreword for Jeremy’s book, I thought of many snarky things to say...but at the end of the day I think it is most accurate to say that I was honored. As someone who has talked, written, and taught a lot about Silverlight, I’ve been watching Jeremy’s love of the entire XAML stack.

As he and I share a love of both XAML and a geographic area, it was hard not to run into his presentations on a variety of subjects germane to this book. He has that key pairing of passion for the subject and technical prowess to see the big picture of best practices. These skills are obvious to anyone who has seen him talk or used his excellent Silverlight open source community contributions. It seems like a natural next step for him to tackle a book. And completely unsurprisingly, he didn’t take a light subject but tackled the difficult problem of architecture and Silverlight. And I suspect you wouldn’t be surprised to know he handled it with much aplomb.

Silverlight is a natural solution for the enterprise space as it combines a web-delivered deployment story and marries it with a rich-client, easy-to-develop solution. The challenge is that creating large, scalable, and maintainable applications using Silverlight requires forethought. While it’s expected that any Silverlight book will cover crucial topics like XAML, data binding, and such, to build enterprise applications, other skills are required. These include architectural patterns (for example, MVVM), composition patterns (for example, inversion of control), testability, and the difficult problem of data. Jeremy tackles these topics by ensuring that you, the reader, know how important it is to think of these topics as more than afterthoughts, but the core of designing mission-critical, line-of-business applications. I, for one, think he has succeeded.

—Shawn Wildermuth, http://wildermuth.com, AgiliTrain