Gill Cleeren - Microsoft Silverlight 5 Data and Services Cookbook

Gill Cleeren is a Microsoft Regional Director, Silverlight MVP (former ASP.NET MVP), and Telerik MVP. He lives in Belgium where he works as .NET architect at Ordina. Passionate about .NET, he's always playing with the newest bits. In his role as Regional Director, Gill has given many sessions, webcasts, and trainings on new as well as existing technologies, such as Silverlight, ASP.NET, and WPF at conferences including TechEd Europe, TechDays BelgiumSwitzerlandSweden, DevDays NL, NDC Oslo Norway, Silverlight Roadshow in Sweden, Telerik RoadShow UK, and so on. He organizes the yearly Community Day event in Belgium and leads Visug, the largest .NET user group in Belgium. You can find his blog at www.snowball.be and on Twitter, you can follow him via @gillcleeren.

Gill published his first book, Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook , with Packt Publishing. He also authored a chapter for Real World .NET, C#, and Silverlight: Indispensible Experiences from 15 MVPs and also authored numerous articles and eBooks for SilverlightShow.net.

After the publication of my first book with Packt, I was very happy with its success. It quickly got a lot of positive reviews on blogs and sites such as Amazon. This was for me the trigger to start writing again. What you're holding here is another year's work of two devoted people who love developing applications with Silverlight and want to share that love with you. Reading it will certainly help you figure out complex problems that you may encounter in your life as a Silverlight developer. Or maybe more generally as an XAML developer, since most of the content can be used in all places where XAML is used as the development language.

Of course, this book is not the work of only the authors. Without the team at Packt and the reviewers, it wouldn't even be possible to complete such a project. And of course, without the patience and love of my girlfriend (and wife-to-be from September 2012) and my mother, I wouldn't be able to walk into a bookstore and be able to hold my work in my hands!

Kevin Dockx lives in Belgium and works at RealDolmen, one of Belgium's biggest ICT companies, where he is a 30-year old technical specialist/project leader on .NET web applications, mainly Silverlight, and a solution manager for Rich Applications (Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, WPF, Surface, HTML5). His main focus lies on all things Silverlight, but he still keeps an eye on the new developments concerning other products from the Microsoft .NET (Web) Stack. As a Silverlight enthusiast, he's a regular speaker at various national and international events, like Microsoft DevDays in The Netherlands, Microsoft Techdays in Portugal, BESUG events (the Belgian Silverlight User Group), Simplicity Day, Community Day, and so on. Next to that, he also writes articles for various Silverlight-related sites. His blog, which contains various tidbits on Silverlight, .NET, and the occasional rambling, can be found at http://blog.kevindockx.com/, and you can contact him on Twitter via @KevinDockx.

He has worked on other books like Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook (Packt Publishing). He has also worked on various articles and ebooks for SilverlightShow.net and other Silverlight-related sites.

I could come up with a long list of people I'd like to thank, and with a bunch of reasons to write this book. But I guess it all boils down to one thing: passion. Passion for technology. Passion to share knowledge. And passion for the next big thing. So I'm going to keep this short: one quote, that's all there is to it:

"Wandering along the lines of another next big thing, remember: there's always room for more ice cream."

Mario Van Hissenhoven is a certified Microsoft SQL Server Professional with more than 10 years of experience. His specialties are development in transact SQL.

Mario also has extended his knowledge to the .NET framework 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5 during the last 5 years. His interest has always been to be on top of the new Microsoft technologies such as Silverlight, WCF, and SQLCLR.

Nowadays, Mario is focusing on SQL Server 2008R2 Development and the Beta features of SQL Server 2012.

I would like to thank my wife and kids for the time spent on reviewing this book while I should have been spending time with them. And I promise I will make it up to them.

Evan Hutnick is a Developer Evangelist working for Telerik in the XAML space covering Silverlight, WPF, Windows Phone, and the up-and-coming WinRT platform. Evan is also a Silverlight MVP and recognized throughout the community for his contributions on best practices, designer/developer concepts, as well as general architecture guidance. While focusing on XAML technologies, Evan often specializes in enterprise development scenarios and best practices for solution structure and architecture.

I thank my wife Jennifer and my daughter Keira for tolerating my insane love of technology and for putting up with the long hours and late nights, I couldn't do it without them.

Kris van der Mast is a Microsoft MVP since 2007, Microsoft ASP Insider, and a respected member and moderator on the official ASP.NET forums where he ranks at the number one position.

After he became an engineer he followed an extensive path into the magical world of web. Besides his work, Kris plays a very active role in the community by delivering articles for magazines, being a board member of the Belgian Windows Azure user group (www.azug.be), presenting or teaching about the latest (web) technologies. More recently Kris became a part of MEET (Microsoft Extended Experts Team).