Microsoft Silverlight 4 and SharePoint 2010 Integration Book Review

This is a very well done little book. Is is short and concise so there is not a lot of filler nonsense I am finding in a lot of books these days. The author does great job of getting you up and running quickly, and then goes into deeper integration topics later in the book. The book covers deploying a Silverlight application to a document library as well as linking a SharePoint module to a Silverlight RIA to deploy your xap file. It really focuses on using SharePoint and Silverlight integrated with each other. They show how to create an external content type using the SharePoint Designer to access data in a SQL database and how to use the Business Connectivity Services (BCS). This is an approach I would not have considered before reading this book. I would have just created an external web service and hit that to access the data, but my approach isn’t really integration. They show how to integrate with SharePoint workflows, how to use CAML queries, how to use the developer dashboard, and how to debug. They do a complete job of showing how to do everything with both the SharePoint 2010 Silverlight Client Object Model and the SharePoint 2010 WCF Data Services. The downloadable code is very well organized and is very usable. They have the complete projects ready to deploy. All in all I think this is a great book. If you are interested in integrating Silverlight 4 and SharePoint 2010, then this book is a must have. It will get you through the learning curve quickly and have you up and running in no time.