Chapter 14. Silverlight Introduction

Availability: Framework 3.5 SP1 Onward

"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 Mac)."

http://silverlight.net/content/GetStarted.aspx

Some might say that Silverlight is Microsoft's version of Adobe's Flash and Flex products. This doesn't really do it justice, though. Silverlight has a number of compelling features that make it an ideal choice for creating web applications with the functionality traditionally only found in desktop applications. These applications are known as rich Internet applications (or RIA to their friends).

Silverlight offers the following:

• Ability to use the .NET development tools you know and love

• Ability to use many of the .NET Framework libraries in your applications (for security reasons, not everything is available)

• An "easyish" path to convert web applications to desktop (WPF) applications if required in the future (also check out Silverlight 3's offline capabilities in Chapter 15)

• Great media-streaming capabilities

• Support for designers (more prevalent in Blend)

Although Silverlight was available for earlier versions of .NET and Visual Studio, I decided to include a brief introduction because Silverlight was released between VS2008 and VS2010, and I suspect that many developers are not aware of how easy it is to use. I believe Silverlight will grow in importance and is something that all .NET developers should at least be aware of.