Silverlight / WPF - Silverlight - Asked By Shailendrasinh Parmar on 11-Jul-08 03:36 AM

What is the purpose of Silverlight?

Why it is used?

How can I use silverlight in my application?

Any simple web example of silverlight with VS 2005 and .Net Framework 2.0 (not the Hellow world Application). ?

I want to start with Silverlight and I am very new to Silverlight.

What is Silverlight?

Microsoft Silverlight is a web browser plugin that provides support for rich internet applications such as animation, vector graphics and audio-video playback.

Silverlight provides a retained mode graphics system, similar to WPF and integrates multimedia, graphics, animations and interactivity into a single runtime. It is being designed to work in concert with XAML and is scriptable with JavaScript.

Purpose? Why it is used?

To better browser experience in viewing animation and audio-video playback.

How can I use silverlight in my application?

see the following links

www.wynapse.com/Silverlight.aspx
www.hanselman.com/blog/SilverlightSamples.aspx

msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb851598.aspx

www.vectorform.com/silverlight/blog/

References

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-9714748-2.html?hhTest=1

weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/02/22/first-look-at-silverlight-2.aspx

1.  "Silverlight for Mobile". Silverlight.net. Retrieved on 2008-03-09.
2. ^ Rafe Needleman. "What is Silverlight, really?". Retrieved on 2007-05-05.
3.  Charles Sterling. "Writing a Windows Sidebar Gadget in Silverlight dead simple". MSDN Blogs. Retrieved on 2008-03-09.
4.  Silverlight FAQs
5. ^ "Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 beta license". Retrieved on 2007-06-14.
6.  "Using a Downloader Object". Retrieved on 2007-05-25.
7.  Mono developers to bring Silverlight to Linux
8. "Opera Watch: More details on Silverlight support in Opera". Retrieved on 2007-05-02.
9. "Silverlight in Opera". Retrieved on 2008-03-10.
10.  Install Silverlight : Unsupported platform, system requirements
11.  "Silverlight 1.0 Released and Silverlight for Linux Announced". Retrieved on 2007-09-05.

Silverlight is a new Web presentation technology that is created to run on a variety of platforms. It enables the creation of rich, visually stunning and interactive experiences that can run everywhere: within browsers and on multiple devices and desktop operating systems (such as the Apple Macintosh). In consistency with WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), the presentation technology in Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 (the Windows programming infrastructure), XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language) is the foundation of the Silverlight presentation capability.

This whitepaper will be a good start if you are looking out for sample code with explanation!

Getting Started with Silverlight

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb404300.aspx

You can think of Silverlight as a Flash alternative for delivering rich media.

It is a cross-browser, cross-platform technology. It runs in all popular Web browsers, including Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple Safari, and on Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS X.

It streams video and audio. It scales video quality to everything from mobile devices to desktop browsers to 720p HDTV video modes. This feature can help in building YouTube like videos.

There are currently two versions of Silverlight : Silverlight 1.0 (that can be programmed with Javascript) and Silverlight 2 (that can be programmed with .NET languages) . Silverlight 2 supports more features than 1.0 ( including .NET Framework support), but it is currently a beta product.

Silverlight integrates seamlessly with your existing JavaScript and ASP.NET AJAX code to complement functionality you have already created.

You can create Silverlight-based Applications using Visual Studio 2008 or Expression Blend

To get started with Silverlight, you can start from here -
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb188743.aspx

Hi,

First, I will tell you some short historical background of Silverlight.

Silverlight is a subset of WPF, this means it's a scaled down version of WPF, but it can run everywhere. Silverlight was originally codenamed WPF/E, and it's created as a mean to run WPF not just on Windows, although it doesn't contain bells and whistles of WPF: 3D, DirectX integration and accelerations, and full desktop application model.

The first version of Silverlight, the Silverlight 1.0, offers only integration of JavaScript and XAML. It's available in runtime and SDK. The runtime itself is so small, only about 1.2MB in size.

The latest version of Silverlight is Silverlight 2.0 beta 2, and it adds Silverlight 1.0 with the capabilities of running C#/VB codes on a small Silverlight 2.0 CLR. This Silverlight CLR is almost the same as .NET CLR, but it has its own CLR runtime and it doesn't have full .NET CLR capabilities. It's intended to support browser's DOM model that integrates well within the Silverlight CLR.

Silverlight can run on almost any browser:

• Silverlight 1.0 runs on IE 6/IE 7, Firefox 1.5,Firefox 2.0
• Silverlight 2.0 runs on IE6/IE 7, Firefox 1.5, Firefox 2.0, Firefox 3.0, Opera 9.1 (or above), Safari

Why it's used?
It's used to promote WPF as a small rich internet application to be run everywhere. It can be viewed as Microsoft's answer/entry into rich multimedia content of Adobe Flash.

But Silverlight 2.0 goes further: it can integrate well into Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend 2.0, even it can integrate well on other IDE such as Spring# (the free IDE of C#), since it allows us to code and debug the code, since it's compiled. It also has the same programming model of its heavier brother, WPF. Although it doesn't have 3D accelerations and again, it's meant to be lightweight across all browsers and platform.

Silverlight is now being supported by Nokia, after it acquires Symbian.

If you download the Silverlight 1.0 SDK or 2.0 SDK, you can find lots of samples there. I recommend you to download the 2.0 SDK, since you can simply debug it on Visual Studio 2008, just like normal .NET application project.

Resources:
http://blogs.msdn.com/mharsh/
http://www.silverlight.net/

I don't get to see many of these while moderating the board and assigning merit.  This post encourages me even more to create an additional "extra credit" merit for the contest.

Good job.

Hi, thanks for guidance.

But, as I mentioned I don't have Visual Studio 2008, I am using Visual Studio 2005.

Can you please provide me some good examples to learn Silverlight with VS 2005.

Thanks

-Sanjay

Hi,

You can use VS 2005 but you'll only limited to develop Silverlight 1.

Silverlight 1 only supports development with XAML and Javascript, while Silverlight 2 includes the additional ability to develop using managed code and this means can be developed using C# or VB.NET, and it's provided with VS 2008.

You can visit this link for how to videos, sample codes:

http://silverlight.net/Learn/videocat.aspx?cat=1

Happy coding!