Todd Snyder - Microsoft Silverlight 5: Building Rich Enterprise Dashboards

Todd Snyder has been a Software Developer/Architect for over 17 years. During that time, he has spent several years as a Consultant, providing technical guidance and leadership for the development of Enterprise Class Systems on the Microsoft Platform. At Infragistics, he is a principal consultant who focuses on the design and construction of RIA and N-tier based applications. Todd is the co-leader for the New Jersey .NET user group (http://www.njdotnet.net/) and is a frequent speaker at trade shows, code camps, and Firestarters.

Joel Eden, Ph.D . has been working in the area of user experience and design methods for over 10 years. Currently a Senior Interaction Designer working on UX Tools at Infragistics, he previously spent 3 years in the Infragistics UX Services group, consulting for external clients. Prior to Infragistics, he worked at multiple design agencies in the Philadelphia area, as well as working at Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Labs. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science, and a PhD in Information Science, both from Drexel University.

I would like to thank my wife Kathleen and my daughters Abigail and Genevieve, for giving me reasons to design a better future.

Jeff Smith has been a Visual Designer for 6 years. During that time he has been an Art Director at various agencies and studied Special Effects and Animation at NYU. A convert from Flash and Flex, he has been working with .NET technologies for the past 2 years, specializing in WPF and Silverlight. At Infragistics, he is an UX Visual Designer who focuses on the design, implementation, and User Experience. You can view some of his work at http://www.thinksinkstudio.com.

I would like to thank my friends, family, girlfriend, and colleagues for providing support and inspiration.

Matt Duffield is the Architect at emGovPower, a leading software provider for managing city and county governments. With over 15 years of working in IT, he enjoys building rich user-centric applications. Matt is very active in the community, speaking at user groups and code camps. He is an INETA speaker member and has been a Microsoft MVP in Client Application Development. He started working in .NET as soon as it was available to the development community and was also an early adopter of both WPF and Silverlight. He believes good business intelligence (BI) architecture is the formula for a successful software package that looks beyond just data and provides insightful information. His blog can be found at http://mattduffield.wordpress.com. You can follow him on Twitter at@mattduffield. Matt currently lives in Charlotte, North Carolina with his wife and two sons.

First of all, I would like to thank my family and colleagues who have been instrumental in helping me work on this book. It is their encouragement and enthusiasm that has in turn been my drive for writing. I have always loved working in Silverlight, and I look forward to many more years doing the same. I would also like to thank the team at Packt Publishing for allowing me to become a part of this book and having the patience and wisdom to help me during the writing process. It has been a wonderful experience, and I look forward to doing it again in the future.

Curtis Taylor is a Principal Consultant at Infragistics, Inc. When he rst started studying human interaction with products, objects and particularly software interfaces, he noticed people often believed they were dumb when they did not understand an interface. However, rather than xing the problem, the industry standardized interfaces which lacked the ability to engage most users. The industry attempted to x the user, rather than the interfaces. Designing interface is an interaction between user and developer. Two things drew him to Software Development the abstraction of writing code and the challenge of presenting that abstraction to human beings in a way they can understand.

People are organic. Computers are not. So the work of making software interfaces more understandable, practical, and enjoyable became something he wanted to do. Software development is his connection to serving people. People are more important than things. Perhaps his message will be communicated in the interfaces he creates, the code he writes, and the feedback, training, and team-work he offers to other developers.

He loves WPF and Silverlight! So much so, Infragistics found and hired him to be a consultant and trainer. At Infragistics he works directly with customers helping them solve technical and UI-related issues with WPF and Silverlight, he provides training as a fellow software engineer, and he develops custom solutions for customers who wish to utilize their services a step beyond the capabilities of their products.

Michael Crump is an MCPD who has been involved with computers in one way or another for as long as he can remember, but started professionally in 2002. After spending years working as a System Administrator/Tech Support Analyst, Michael branched out and started developing internal utilities that automated repetitive tasks and freed up full-time employees. From there, he was offered a job working at McKesson corporation and has been working with some form of .NET and VB/C# since 2003.

Michael is currently serving as a Subject Matter Expert (SME) and Content Editor on several other Silverlight publications. He resides in Birmingham, AL with his wife Amanda and children Ridley and Adrienne.