A good Silverlight 3.0 reference application, with source?

Question

Having never written a production quality Silverlight app, I am looking to find a quality open source reference application for Silverlight 3.0 (Silverlight 4.0 is no good as I have VS2008) to help learn Silverlight.

Ideally I'd like to see:

• a line of business application, in the client-server tradition.
• SQL Server back end
• no use of 3rd party libraries like PRISM or CSLA as I would like to see how the core Silverlight technologies work.

I realise there are plenty of open source projects on Codeplex, but struggled to find any classic line of business apps there.

Answer 1

In all honesty, get yourself upgraded to VS 2010. If you are serious about becoming a professional in Silverlight development, version 4 has the most bang-for-your-buck.

Not all the newer technologies are supported for Silverlight 3 and all the latest cool tutorials and project examples tend to be in VS2010/SL4.

You also should not ignore patterns like MVVM and libraries like Prism & MEF as they are rapidly becoming commonplace for Silverlight projects. There is more danger of you getting into Win-forms-style bad habits if you use a Win-forms style approach to Silverlight at first.

Here is a simple explanation of MVVM for Silverlight: http://openlightgroup.net/Blog/tabid/58/EntryId/89/Silverlight-View-Model-Style-An-Overly-Simplified-Explanation.aspx

These videos are a good introduction to creating/understanding Prism-based projects, specifically for Silverlight: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/mtaulty/Prism--Silverlight-Part-1-Taking-Sketched-Code-Towards-Unity/ It includes him building an Outlook-style application using prism (with full source provided).

The codeplex project, full source and documents etc, for Prism and soon MEF is here: http://compositewpf.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Getting%20Started&referringTitle=Home Prism was created by Microsoft and will soon have a final release of version 4 (including MEF).