We want to include Silverlight 4 RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) in SharePoint 2010. RIAs provide rich experience for users, both through their browsers and outside them. Integrating Silverlight RIAs in SharePoint 2010 offers amazing opportunities to combine the power and flexibility offered by SharePoint with great user experiences. In fact, many interfaces shown in SharePoint 2010 are developed in Silverlight. We want to integrate Silverlight RIAs into SharePoint 2010. First, we must understand some of the fundamentals that are related to various tools and their configurations. In this chapter, we will cover many topics to help us understand the new tools and techniques involved in creating Silverlight RIAs for SharePoint 2010 sites. We will:
- Understand the benefits of integrating Silverlight with SharePoint
- Prepare the development environment to develop applications for SharePoint 2010 using Silverlight 4
- Prepare the SharePoint 2010 server to host Silverlight applications
- Create a Silverlight Line of Business RIA
- Learn to add a Silverlight RIA to a SharePoint site
- Understand the advantage of creating rich user experiences for SharePoint solutions
- Work with shared documents to store a Silverlight application in SharePoint sites
- Work with many Silverlight applications in a single page
- Learn the differences between client and server code
The following list shows many benefits of integrating Silverlight with SharePoint 2010:
- Rich UX: Silverlight RIAs can offer a rich user experience. You can take full advantage of the rich visual capabilities offered by Silverlight and include them in a SharePoint site. The rich and interactive content offers an incredible new world of possibilities in SharePoint. For example, you can offer an interactive balanced scorecard with animated graphs, rich navigation capabilities, and context menus.
- Code runs on the client: You can take advantage of the power of the client computers accessing the SharePoint server. You can use threading and asynchronous calls to offer responsive user interfaces and to take advantage of modern multi-core microprocessors found in client computers. You can offer great response times without the need to wait for the server to load another page. You can take advantage of rich controls, animations, and exciting multimedia effects. The processing removes load from the server and enables you to use both the server and the client in your solutions. Additionally, Silverlight 4 is cross-browser capable and we can take advantage of the improved Out of Browser features to create applications that interact with the SharePoint 2010 server but run in the Windows desktop, out of the Web browser.
- Efficient applications: As you can work with the power offered by the client, you can process data without the need to make requests to the server all the time. This way, you can create load-balanced solutions.
- Access to the Client OM (Client Object Model): When you have to access data and services offered by the SharePoint 2010 server, you don't need to create your own complex infrastructure. There is no need to add additional layers. You can take advantage of the new Client Object Model, also known as Client OM. As you can work with asynchronous calls to the Client OM, you can still offer great responsive applications when consuming services from the server. Users can interact with SharePoint data without requiring server calls as they would from traditional pages. Lots of the processing can be pushed down to the client. This way, as previously explained, you can remove load from the SharePoint server and create load-balanced solutions.
- Leverage your existing Silverlight knowledge, components, and applications: You can build new capabilities quickly from existing Silverlight components and applications, integrating them with SharePoint 2010.
Considering the aforementioned benefits, we will work hard to learn all the possibilities offered by the integration of Silverlight and SharePoint 2010 in later parts of the book.
Now, when we design a new SharePoint 2010 solution, we will be able to consider Silverlight RIAs as new components for the global solution. We have to consider the aforementioned benefits of integrating Silverlight with SharePoint and decide which parts would be convenient to create as Silverlight RIAs.
This way, we can focus on preparing the SharePoint 2010 infrastructure and then we can access data and services offered by the server through Silverlight RIAs. For example, you can view the images found in an assets library defined in SharePoint through a Silverlight application.