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Chapter 1

Adding Silverlight to Your Web

Development Toolkit

In This Chapter

▶ Understanding Rich Internet Applications (RIA)

▶ Seeing how Silverlight enables RIA development

▶ Understanding what you need to develop Silverlight applications

▶ Seeing what Silverlight can do beyond just creating a stylish user interface

atch out, Adobe — Silverlight 4 is here to give you a run for your

money. Web site designers and developers alike can find much to

be excited about in Microsoft’s answer to Adobe Flash. As we tell you in

more detail in the Introduction to this book, Silverlight 4 is one of a new

family of Web site applications that provide graphics, animation, audio,

and video — all the features necessary for the kind of rich user experience

people have come to expect on the Web. These applications are called Rich

Internet Applications (RIA). Adobe Flash was one of the first in the RIA arena;

more recently, Microsoft made its entry into this space with the launch of

Silverlight.

In this chapter, we give you an overview of what Silverlight is, what it can do,

and the tools you need to develop Silverlight applications.

Obtaining and Running Silverlight

As does Adobe Flash, Silverlight runs as a plug-in within the browser and

needs to be installed the first time any Silverlight application is run. A plug-in

is a piece of software that is not part of the Web browser but can be added to

it to run additional applications. When a user visits a Web site that needs the

Silverlight plug-in, the Web browser will prompt the user to install it.

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL

Summary of content (14 pages)

PAGE 1
Chapter 1 In This Chapter ▶ Understanding Rich Internet Applications (RIA) MA ▶ Seeing how Silverlight enables RIA development TE RI AL Adding Silverlight to Your Web Development Toolkit ▶ Understanding what you need to develop Silverlight applications D ▶ Seeing what Silverlight can do beyond just creating a stylish user interface TE W PY RI GH atch out, Adobe — Silverlight 4 is here to give you a run for your money.
PAGE 2
10 Part I: Illuminating Silverlight After the plug-in is installed, visiting any site that hosts a Silverlight application causes Silverlight to start up in the browser seamlessly. The plug-in itself is around 4MB, and in addition to the Silverlight runtime (which is responsible for running the Silverlight application), the application itself needs to be downloaded from the site that hosts the application.
PAGE 3
Chapter 1: Adding Silverlight to Your Web Development Toolkit When the page comes up, the screen displays numerous small images of the memorabilia, but each time you click an image, you zoom in to it. As you zoom in to the image, it first appears blurred and progressively becomes sharper. This is because the whole photograph (which can be several megabytes in size) does not load in one go; instead, it loads progressively as you need it. You can also see several animations on the site.
PAGE 4
12 Part I: Illuminating Silverlight Figure 1-3: An example of a dynamic site with a rich user interface. Grasping the Potential of Silverlight One of the main advantages of Silverlight is that if you are a developer and have already been creating applications using Microsoft technologies, you do not have to learn something new to create Silverlight applications. You can program Silverlight applications using .NET languages such as C# and VB.NET.
PAGE 5
Chapter 1: Adding Silverlight to Your Web Development Toolkit ✓ Support for drawing vector graphic images and doing 3-D perspective transformations ✓ Support for creating storyboards and animations ✓ A full suite of controls, such as text boxes and buttons, and support for creating your own controls ✓ Layout management support, which allows you to lay out controls in a variety of ways ✓ Styling of controls, which allows the properties of your controls to be standardized and reused ✓ Skinning, which allows y
PAGE 6
14 Part I: Illuminating Silverlight A brief history of the name “Silverlight” Silverlight was initially called WPF/e (for “WPF everywhere”), which would have been a terrible name for it. It needed a catchy and simple name, and eventually the name Silverlight was chosen. Version 1 was released in September 2007, and it mainly accomplished the delivery of rich media and programming that couldn’t be done using languages like C# and VB.NET.
PAGE 7
Chapter 1: Adding Silverlight to Your Web Development Toolkit The HTML tag is an object tag that specifies the data attribute and the type. These elements signify that a Silverlight object is being created. The param name=“source” tag contains the relative location of the .xap file that will be run when the application starts.
PAGE 8
16 Part I: Illuminating Silverlight Visual Studio To write, compile, and debug programs, you need an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Visual Studio is the IDE of choice for building applications that run in Microsoft’s .NET environment. Visual Studio supports languages such as VB.NET and C#, and you can use it to create Silverlight applications, too.
PAGE 9
Chapter 1: Adding Silverlight to Your Web Development Toolkit standards endorsed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It also contains something called Super Preview, which enables you to see how pages look in different browsers at design time. Traditionally, designers have struggled to make their applications look the same across multiple browsers, and Super Preview allows them to look at these pages side by side or even overlap each other to observe and fix differences.
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18 Part I: Illuminating Silverlight Figure 1-5: Graphics created using Expression Design. Figure 1-6: A video file being edited in Expression Encoder.
PAGE 11
Chapter 1: Adding Silverlight to Your Web Development Toolkit Silverlight Toolkit The Silverlight Toolkit is a collection of controls and utilities for Silverlight that supplements what is already present in the core Silverlight libraries. The Silverlight Toolkit includes additional controls (such as charts) that are very useful but aren’t used daily by applications.
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20 Part I: Illuminating Silverlight Figure 1-7: Deep Zoom composer in action. Creating Rich User Experiences in Silverlight Rich Internet applications such as Silverlight aim to provide a dynamic experience for Web site users. This dynamism comes in the form of graphics, animation, audio, and video, and Silverlight supports all these features. In fact, Silverlight 1.0 was all about playing audio and video files in a browser, and nothing more.
PAGE 13
Chapter 1: Adding Silverlight to Your Web Development Toolkit In addition to all these features, Silverlight, out of the box, contains around 60 controls. Control is another name for tools such as text boxes, buttons, and other elements that appear on Web sites. Part II of this book covers all the fundamentals you need to get started on working with the most commonly used controls.
PAGE 14
22 Part I: Illuminating Silverlight Silverlight does not have any API calls to talk to the database directly. It can use Web services or use another technology called WCF Data Services. Using WCF Data Services, Silverlight can perform all the necessary database operations such as creating, reading, updating, and deleting (known collectively as CRUD) data using calls to a Web service. WCF Data Services is accessed by applications as RESTful services.