I’m very glad to be able to announce that my new book, written together with Gill Cleeren, is now available for sale through a variety of channels, like our publishers’ site or Amazon.

After the first book was published, it quickly became apparent that there is a demand for high-quality Silverlight books – and apparently, we were on the right track with our book, as it got lots of great reviews.  The “cookbook” format, in which you get concrete problems with concrete & to-the-point solutions appeared to be quite popular. 

Logically, you start thinking about a second book.  The easy thing to do would have been to simply update every recipe to Silverlight 5 & republish the book with a different title, but we expressly didn’t want to do that: we figured that, if we were going to release a second book, it would have to be good enough so that even owners of the first book would want it.

Therefore, we ended up with a whopping 662 pages.  Every recipe has been reviewed again, and a lot of new content has been added.  We now have a complete chapter on MVVM, we added a new chapter on Windows Phone, we completely rewrote the WCF RIA Services chapter and added an “Advanced WCF RIA Services” chapter.  Next to that, lots of other recipes were added, including some on how to integrate Windows Identity Foundation with Silverlight, and some featuring the new data and services-related Silverlight 5 capabilities.

All in all, we tried to publish a new, high quality book with lots of new, up-to-date content, in the same cookbook format that proved to be so popular.  We sincerely hope we succeeded in this mission, and we hope you like it as well.  It’s been a long ride. :-)

Here’s an overview of what can find in our new book:

• Design and develop rich data-driven business applications in Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 following best practices
• Rapidly interact with services and handle multiple sources of data within Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 business applications
• Understand sophisticated data access techniques in your Silverlight business applications by binding data to Silverlight controls, validating data in Silverlight, getting data from services into Silverlight applications, using data and services using MVVM techniques and much more!
• Packed with practical, hands-on cookbook recipes, illustrating the techniques to solve particular data problems effectively within your Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 business applications

You can order it from Packt’s site, or from Amazon.