A step by step guide to begin the silverlight journey

Begin the Silverlight Journey This

article

from

CRB

Tech

reviews

would

help

you

start

your Silverlight journey, right from today itself. Let’s proceed with it.

Introduction: You

are

reading

this

article

since

you

are

either

intrigued

by

what Silverlight brings to the table, or perhaps you need to begin developing in Silverlight. Maybe you are only inquisitive to perceive how Silverlight may help you enhance your web applications; or possibly you were dependable excessively sluggish, making it impossible to learn Flash (like me) and now that there’s a .NET proportional, you’ve chosen it’s a great opportunity to take the dive!

Understanding Silverlight: According to Microsoft, “Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications.

Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows.”

As per Wikipedia: “Silverlight

is

a

proprietary

runtime

for

browser-based

Rich

Internet

Applications, providing a subset of the animation, vector graphics, and video playback capabilities of Windows Presentation Foundation.”

Overview of Silverlight: Here are a few points of what Silverlight brings to the table: 1. It is compatible with different browsers on Macintosh and Windows.

2. It empowers the rendering of richer user encounters that are characterized by 3.

XAML. It

renders

media

(video

and

music).

4. Developers and designers can construct their Silverlight applications based upon their preferred code including JavaScript or managed .NET code.

5. The plug-in is of less size (2MB) to download for end users, and subsequently simple to embrace.

More can be perused on the Silverlight Architecture at MSDN.

Downloading and Getting Started: Alright, so enough of reading , how about we begin! We are going to build up our first Silverlight Application utilizing Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 and the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha runtime. In the first place, we have to setup our environment

before

we

can

begin

coding.

Go

to

http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/and complete the below steps: Download and install the latest version of Silverlight Runtime (1.1 Alpha) for windows.

You need to install VS2008 Beta 2 if you have not done it previously.

Download and later install Silverlight Tools Alpha for VS2008 beta 2. This installs a plugin so you can make Silverlight ventures in VS2008 Beta 2. If it’s not too much trouble take note of that this won’t work in express releases.

Once you are done with the downloading and the installation part, we are ready to proceed with the same.

Opening the first Silverlight application: Go to Visual Studio 2008 beta 2 and click on File–>New–>Project; select Silverlight Project; enter a project name e.g. “First Silverlight” and click on OK button.

Comparison between Flash and Silverlight: There have been many discussions on this subject. Flash developers don’t appear to like what Microsoft has “endeavored to offer in terms of Rich Internet Applications,” however how about we recall that one thing: it’s another release!

What were the primary adaptations of Flash like? Obviously, there will be confinements and possibly blemishes in the prior releases. One preferred

standpoint Microsoft has on its side is this: It can gain from all the shortcomings of the prior Flash versions throughout the years. One cannot be one-sided and say which is better since Flash may be better for a few engineers and Silverlight better for others. One is keen on Silverlight for one reason and one reason just: Being a .NET developer, one can make Silverlight applications in visual Studio utilizing C#.

So it just is by all accounts the undeniable decision for me. It is proposed you go to the Silverlight Homepage and read why you ought to utilize Silverlight. A rundown of sites and discussions are accessible here composed of engineers on both sides of the wall. It is additionally essential to realize what the new components are in the most recent 1.1 Alpha release contrasted with the initial release. This can be found on MSDN here. It is said in light of the fact that a considerable measure of articles that remark on Silverlight have just utilized or referred version 1.

We have now got an introduction as to what Silverlight is and how to develop your environment to make your own Silverlight applications.

We have experienced a basic venture to see what makes up a Silverlight application and how every one of the pieces fit together. We have just secured the fundamentals and this is just the tip of the mountain.

In further articles, in all probability, we will bear on from where we left off, make sense of how to debug our Silverlight projects and cover some more advanced components and features. All the more critically, we will take a gander at some prettier cases by playing with Expression Blend.

Presently it’s dependent upon you. Try different things with XAML, download the specimens and play. Good Luck!CRB Tech reviews will continue to enlighten you with such technical articles on .NET.

Related Articles: Microsoft Silverlight : Top 10 Features Top 5 Silverlight Development Tools