Shifting From Silverlight to HTML 5

When you create a new application, you can choose between the Silverlight-based applications or HTML5 applications. In either case, you can use either C# or Visual Basic.

Once your application starts, you can either connect to an existing database or design your own database. Here we’re building a client invoice table for a freelance author application.

Joins with foreign keys are easy to accomplish simply by linking two tables together. You do not manually provide a foreign key; the connection is made automatically for you.

After you create your data, you can add screens to your project by right-clicking on the Solution Explorer. Note that the Solution Explorer is very similar to what you find in Visual Studio.

Once you create the screen, you get a tree diagram of the screen’s components, from which you can make adjustments to the screen and add navigation.

Instead of creating your tables from scratch, you can attach to an existing database. One such option allows you to use Microsoft’s OData protocol.

You can add new buttons to your screens and have the buttons automatically trigger certain tasks. Here we’re creating a button that saves the user data added in the screen.

Forms can easily be created, allowing different types of controls to appear. Here’s the form running in the browser. Notice especially the date fields.

Foreign keys in the forms appear as pop-ups listing the data from the foreign table. Here the table displays only one item, eWEEK, but you can easily have more items.

You can write server-side code in C# or, as shown here, client-side code in JavaScript.

Attaching to a public OData source, such as Netflix, you can display the data with a Windows 8 look. Here we’re listing the Genres available.

Here, we’re showing the same Netflix data but with a list appearance. This only required a quick change in the configuration.