IN THIS CHAPTER
Thank you for picking up Silverlight 1.0 Unleashed! Silverlight is changing the way many people think about designing and developing websites or web applications, and this book helps you take advantage of everything Silverlight enables. Silverlight makes it easier than ever to create rich web-based content or applications. And given that it’s possible to use Silverlight without expensive development or design tools, learning Silverlight is a wonderful way for everyone from hobbyists to professionals to create compelling software.
As Silverlight was developed, it was obvious that a new wave of books would appear in the marketplace. But it wasn’t clear to me that these Silverlight books would have the right balance to guide people through the technology while showing practical ways to exploit it. Therefore, I wrote Silverlight 1.0 Unleashed with the following goals in mind:
I hope you find this book to exhibit all these attributes.
This book is for software developers and designers who are interested in creating compelling web-based content, applications, or controls. This book contains a lot of content to help you get the most out of Silverlight, regardless of your prior experience with other technologies. And even if you are already well versed in Silverlight, I’m confident that this book still has something to teach you. At the very least, it should be an invaluable reference for your bookshelf.
To summarize, this book
Examples in this book appear in XAML, HTML, and JavaScript. You do not need to be familiar with these languages in order to understand this book.
By focusing on version 1.0, this book clearly shows what you can and can’t accomplish with the first version of Silverlight. If you are interested in learning about future Silverlight features in more depth, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) Unleashed provides a good preview of the direction Silverlight is heading (which is to more closely resemble the feature set of WPF).
Three pieces of software are required to use the samples in this book:
If you want to run the samples on Linux instead, you can use Moonlight, Novell’s open source implementation of Silverlight for Linux. The plan (not yet realized at the time of writing) is for Moonlight to run on all Linux distributions and support the Firefox, Opera, and Konqueror browsers.
Although a lot of Silverlight development can be done with a simple text editor, you can be more productive with the following recommended software:
The source code for examples in this book can be downloaded via www.informit.com/title/9780672330070 or www.adamnathan.net/silverlight.
This book is arranged into three parts:
Part I: Fundamentals
Part II: Creating Static Content
Part III: Making Your Content Come to Life
The first two chapters explain the fundamentals. Chapter 1 focuses on ways to get Silverlight content into a web page and your options for how it interacts with HTML. Chapter 2 explores XAML in great depth, giving you the foundation to understand the XAML you’ll encounter in the rest of the book and in real life.
Part II covers the variety of static content that Silverlight is capable of rendering. This not only includes text and images, but also sophisticated vector-based content. Chapter 6 ends Part II by showing how to arrange, resize, and even transform multiple pieces of content in rich ways.
The final part of the book explains how you can make your otherwise static content come to life. Chapter 7 is the most important chapter for developers because Silverlight’s input events make it possible to create an interactive application. Chapter 8 demonstrates how you can greatly improve the experience with large content by downloading it on-the-fly and showing slick progress indicators. And with animation, audio, and video (covered in Chapters 9 and 10), you can make your content or application quite stunning.
Various typefaces in this book identify terms and other special items. These typefaces include the following:
Throughout this book, you’ll find the following sidebar elements:
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