If you’ve been watching the technical news or attended MIX ‘07, then you’ve probably been hearing about Silverlight (f.k.a. WPF/E). The idea behind Silverlight is simple — provide a cross-browser, cross-platform technology for 2D vector graphics, animations and DRM high-definition media. Currently, Microsoft is targeting the Mac using either Firefox or Safari and Windows using IE6/IE7 or Firefox.

There are actually two different versions of Silverlight currently available. The first, 1.0 (beta), utilizes the same XAML tags as WPF to describe the visual appearance and animations for content. It uses Javascript to control the behavior of those elements by allowing Javascript functions to locate and manipulate properties of the elements created in XAML. This release targets web developers as it uses many of the technologies they are familiar with and use in their development today.

The second version, 1.1 (alpha) was announced at MIX ‘07 and it adds a CLR engine to the implementation - allowing the code behind to be done in C# or VB.NET instead of Javascript. This will radically change the playing field, as it will open up rich-client web applications to a wide audience of .NET developers.

The first step in using either version of Silverlight is to download the appropriate browser plug-in. You can get these from the Silverlight website http://www.silverlight.net. Both 1.0 and 1.1 versions have Mac and Windows implementations available. If you want to use Visual Studio .NET to do your development, then you should download the Orcas Beta release and the project template for Silverlight.

Download pdf Introducing to Silverlight