Pathfinder Development » Getting Started with Silverlight

Getting Started with Silverlight

Karthik Muthupalaniappan, Friday, July 11, 2008 @ 12:37 pm

For people who are not aware what Silverlight is, Silverlight is Microsoft's cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.

Silverlight was designed to address these properties:

Lightweight browser plug-in—Silverlight has Windows and Macintosh modules that are designed to enhance Internet Explorer (versions 6.0 and 7.0), Firefox 2.0, and Safari browsers.
Native presentation runtime— Software-based browser enhancement that allows rendering of XAML-based interactive 2-D graphics, text, and media, in addition to the browser native rendering of HTML. XAML can be used inline, in a file, or in a package.
Interactive video and audio—Cross-platform independent media runtime that can render Windows Media content (WMV and WMA) in addition to MP3. Video and audio are handled as a media element in XAML, enabling flexibility in their presentation. Furthermore, the media support leverages the huge infrastructure and ecosystem around Windows Media, enabling cost-effective delivery of top-quality media.
Programming layer—In consistency with the Web architecture, Silverlight XAML is exposed using a DOM model to JavaScript. That way, AJAX programs can utilize the extended markup rendering capability using the same programming paradigms and practices (on the client and on the server).

The image below outlines Silverlight's architecture.

Silverlight Architecture

Silverlight applications can be written in any .NET programming language. As such, any development tools which can be used with .NET languages can work with Silverlight, provided they can target the Silverlight CoreCLR for hosting the application, instead of the .NET Framework CLR. Microsoft has positioned Microsoft Expression Blend versions 2.0 and 2.5 for designing the UI of Silverlight 1.0 and 2 applications respectively. Visual Studio 2008 can be used to develop and debug Silverlight applications. To create Silverlight projects and let the compiler target CoreCLR, Visual Studio 2008 requires the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio which is available as a beta release.

A Silverlight project contains the Silverlight.js and CreateSilverlight.js files which initializes the Silverlight plugin for use in HTML pages, a XAML file for the UI, and code-behind files for the application code. Silverlight applications are debugged in a manner similar to ASP.NET applications. Visual Studio's CLR Remote Cross Platform Debugging feature can be used to debug Silverlight applications running on a different platform as well.

I have listed below a bunch of links that can help one get started on Silverlight :

This tutorial starts you off on the customary "Hello World" application using vs-2008 and Silverlight 2

This tutorial talks about using Style Elements to better encapsulate look and feel

This video discusses binding a sample Silverlight control to n-tier application's business layer

This one's about how to consume WCF and ASP .NET web services in Silverlight

This provides information about different ASP .NET controls for Silverlight

I ll try to take a deeper dive into some of the specifics of Silverlight Implementation using the .NET framework in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

Topics: ASP.NET, Silverlight