What is the Telerik Sales Dashboard?

The Telerik Sales Dashboard is a demo application for monitoring a company’s sales representatives’ performance. The dashboard provides senior management with rich data visualizations for analyzing enterprise data, thus facilitating the decision-making process in a typical business environment. The demo demonstrates a best practice approach for structuring a large-scale enterprise application that has a single business-logic layer shared by two different presentation layers: a desktop version (built on WPF), and a web version (built on Silverlight). Both UI implementations have an identical look, thanks to the industry’s only truly cross-platform UI components –RadControls for Silverlight and RadControls for WPF. The two suites share the same API and are derived from the same codebase, enabling extensive code reuse between WPF and Silverlight applications.

How is the Telerik Sales Dashboard built?

The Tools

To build the Telerik Dashboard, we have used Telerik RadControls for Silverlight and RadControls for WPF, demonstrating their common API, rich data visualization capabilities and binding mechanism. Telerik OpenAccess ORM was used for the enterprise-grade data access layer. Together with the advanced binding mechanism of RadControls the data is displayed with minimum coding.

The Shared Codebase

Building mirror web and desktop applications that provide identical user interfaces is now almost a trivial task, thanks to the innovation delivered by Telerik RadControls. Both the WPF and Silverlight suites are derived from the same codebase and share the same API. In essence, they represent two almost mirror toolsets for building rich line-of-business web and desktop applications, with substantial code reuse.

The Composite Approach

The Telerik Dashboard is also a showcase of the new Microsoft Composite Client Application Guidance (code-named “Prism”). The Guidance is designed to help you build modular WPF and Silverlight applications with “separation of concerns”, meaning that the application’s logical and presentational layers are clearly separated, which on its turn allows for a separation of roles between different teams and for easy maintenance at the same time. The Telerik Dashboard is composed of loosely coupled, semi-independent components, which can be separately and easily modified or extended with new functionalities to respond to unforeseen requirements or customer feedback.

System Requirements