Silverlight - Introduction

Microsoft Silverlight is a programmable web browser plug-in that enables features such as animation, vector graphics and audio-video playback that characterizes rich Internet applications.

Silverlight provides a retained mode graphics system similar to Windows Presentation Foundation, and integrates multimedia, graphics, animations and interactivity into a single runtime environment. In Silverlight applications, user interfaces are declared in XAML and programmed using a subset of the .NET Framework. XAML can be used for marking up the vector graphics and animations. Textual content created with Silverlight is searchable and indexable by search engines as it is not compiled, but represented as text (XAML).

Releases

1. Silverlight 1.0
2. Silverlight 2
3. Silverlight 3

Tools for Silverlight application

To developing Silverlight application, Microsoft has been released some set of tools. They are,

• Visual Studio 2008 with Service Pack 1
• Silverlight 2 Beta 2 SDK
• Expression Blend 2 July 2008 Preview

All of us known about Visual Studio. Expression Blend is Microsoft's user interface design tool for creating graphical interfaces for web and desktop applications. Blend is writing using the .NET Framework 3.0 and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Microsoft Expression Blend does the same of Adobe Photoshop to edit your images as well as add effects to existing images.

How to create Silverlight applications?

There is a question in our mind raising that “How to create Silverlight applications?” Here is the answer for your question,

1. Use Visual Studio 2008 SP1 to create a new Silverlight project based on the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Template. Visual Studio will do the necessary steps to add a single HTML page or a single website to host your Silverlight application. This is because Silverlight is a plug-in that renders in the browser.

2. Add your necessary XAML files needed for the user interface. This is similar to the forms that you would add to a Windows Form application.

3. Edit the XAML page using Expression Blend 2 July 2008 preview. Note that Because each page in Silverlight 2 Beta 2 is treated as a user control, only Expression Blend 2 July 2008 preview will be capable of opening these particular XAML files. Any older version of Expression Blend will throw an error message saying that it is unable to open that file type.

4. Switch to Visual Studio 2008 SP1 to write code behind files for the controls and pages that you created in Step 2.

5. Build and compile the application.

6. Host the same in IIS or any web server of your choice. For this demonstration, you will rely on Windows Vista for development and IIS for hosting the application.


...S.VinothkumaR.

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