Silverlight is Microsoft’s cross-browser, cross-platform browser plug-in that allows the creation of interactive web applications that employ high quality streaming media, vector graphics, images, and animation. Deployed as a plug-in for the major browsers on the Windows, Mac and Linux (supported by Novell) operating systems, web developers can craft interactive applications that have an identical user experience on the vast majority of web browsers deployed today. Silverlight addresses a disconnect that exists today in web development workflow where the design intent of graphics designers and interaction designers cannot be faithfully communicated to and crafted by the web developers. In Silverlight, this intent is created in design tools like Expression Design and Expression Blend and passed off to web developers in XML-based XAML data files. The fidelity of the designers’ ideas is kept as there is a clear separation between the design in XAML and the code in JavaScript.
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Test-driven development is something that every developer can appreciate once they?ve tried it, and something that I?ve worked hard to enable for Silverlight with the release of the controls source. Scott Guthrie previously posted about the Silverlight 2 Beta 1 release, with a First Look at Silverlight 2 post followed by the First Look at Using Expression Blend with Silverlight 2. If we could take the same application from the Blend post & create a set of unit tests for the components in the app, it would pay dividends once we start adding new features or working with other developers on the project.
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Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2008 introduces a whole new set of .NET technologies that will revolutionize, once again, the way you develop smart client and web-based applications; the most notable being LINQ, WPF and, of course, Silverlight. For most of us working in and around web application development in the business world, Silverlight is a big step forward; especially if you consider that it provides clean coding practices with extensible languages (e.g. XAML and C#). It also provides some of Visual Studio’s rich programming model that we have become accustomed to and can no longer live without; such as class libraries, debugging capabilities and IntelliSense among many others.
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Beginning with version 2.5 (currently in Preview Edition) building Silverlight 2 applications, and especially assembling the User Interface components such as items from the toolbox, and layout controls, is easier than ever. A Note on This Tutorial. The history of the material for this tutorial is that Scott Guthrie wrote a terrific introduction to this material at the end of February, which he gave me permission to turn into a series of videos, currently (or soon to be) available on Silverlight.NET. This tutorial completes the circle by building on the videos and integrating the material into the Silverlight Tutorial series. The project we’re setting out to build is very similar to the Silverlight chat service built by ScottGu, and is shown in Figure 5-1
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Install the following software components on Windows Vista machine with at least 2GB RAM:
1. Visual Studio 2008
2. ASP.NET Extensions preview (http://asp.net/downloads/3.5-extensions/)
3. Silverlight Developer Tools (http://silverlight.net/GetStarted)
a. Silverlight 2 developer runtime
b. Silverlight 2 SDK
c. Silverlight 2 templates for Visual Studio 2008
d. Expression Blend 2 SP1
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1. Work with data in a unified and integrated way.
• Be more productive by using a single approach to querying and manipulating data that’s integrated with the way you write code—in the programming language.
• Language-Integrated Query (line) lets you use a single model to query and transform XML, Microsoft® SQL Server TM, and object data, helping you focus on what you need the data to do rather than how you are going to access the data.
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Microsoft Expression Blend is an application that generates XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) via a user interface. Blend is designed to create all of the WPF UI (User Interface) elements such as windows, buttons, grid, and brushes on a designer surface. Blend will then emit all the necessary XAML code. Blend is a designer tool, so you still use Visual Studio 2005 to write the application code. (Note: If you have the next version of Visual Studio, codenamed “Orcas,” installed, you don’t need to install the Visual Studio Extensions for WPF or the .NET Framework 3.)
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