Introduction to Silverlight

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What is Silverlight? It’s part of a Microsoft Web platform called

Rich Internet Applications (RIA) There is a service side to this too (RIA services)

It supports multiple operating systems and browsers

It supports multiple devices It’s a small browser plug-in It easily plays video and audio (Before HTML

5, this is how Netflix streamed)

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What is Silverlight Some say it’s a direct competitor to

Adobe Flash Markup is based on WPF XAML (another

XML dialect) It’s designed to improve the Web UI

experience

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Silverlight History (1.0) Introduced in 2007 was originally called

WPF/E (everywhere) Did not support .NET managed code

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Silverlight History (1.0)

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Silverlight History (2.0) Released in 2008 Supported .NET managed code. (Just

another .NET application now) Based on version 3.5 of the .NET

framework Silverlight now has its own simplified

framework class library UI tools get much more robust

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Silverlight History (2.0)

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Silverlight History (3.0) Released in 2009 Support for 3-D graphics was added Additional controls added along with

improved control formatting

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Silverlight History (4.0 and 5.0) Really just a bunch more features Numerous performance improvements

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Silverlight Development Most of what you need is built into

Visual Studio Just create a Silverlight project

You need another download to install the emulator for Windows phone All Windows phone programming is thru

Silverlight Will not run on servers

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Silverlight Development

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Creating a First Silverlight Application Create a Silverlight application Host the application in a new Web site

See dialog next screen This template is only for testing

Note that all current Silverlight versions are supported by Visual Studio

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Creating a First Silverlight Application

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What got Created (1) You get the Silverlight project with one

default control App.xaml and App.xaml.cs contain the

application startup code The file MainPage.xaml and MainPage.xaml

contains the main page that will be rendered You get a test project

The default test page loads the Silverlight control

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What got Created (2)

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Instantiating the Control

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Instantiating the Control (1) The object element allows the control to

be embedded into the Web page Attributes

The data attribute is not necessary but (for some reason) improves the performance for ‘some’ browsers

The param element named source attribute points to the .xap file

It’s this file that contains the Silverlight control code

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Instantiating the Control (2) The param element named onError points to

the Javascript code that handles any errors The minRuntimeVersion parameter

describes the minimal runtime version required for the control

The <a> tag allows users to download Silverlight in case it is not already installed

The <iframe> tag is used to fool the Safari browser

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Template Files Created

You need not usually touch this startup code

The page in the other project contains a test page to host your Silverlight control

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Introduction to the Silverlight Control Regarding App.xaml:

We don’t need to touch this much for simple applications

The function App is the Silverlight constructor

Application_UnhandledException is the facility to report the error to the Document Object model

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Introduction to the Silverlight Control Regarding MainPage.xaml and

MainPage.xaml.cs These files contain the code for the control

itself The .xaml file contain the markup The .cs file contains the code

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Creating the UI The process is the same as we would

see with a desktop application Use the toolbox to create the UI

It’s XAML instead of a nativ language Use the Code Editor to create the code

behind