Professional Visual Basic® 2010 and .NET 4

Chapter 19. Silverlight

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER

• General Silverlight Overview

• Silverlight Media Features

• Starting a Silverlight Project

• Silverlight Navigation Application

• Silverlight Class Library

• What makes up a Silverlight Solution

• How to use layout controls

• Using Silverlight out of the browser

Rich internet application (RIA) is growing at a fast pace with new technologies coming out every day. Many of these technologies begin to widen the gap between the traditional application developer and Web developers. At the same time, Web development continues to be a conglomerate of many different technologies, including things like CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Flash, Action Scripting, and a dozen other languages and technologies. Silverlight was introduced by Microsoft so that .NET developers could leverage their existing skill set. By leveraging the skills you have already learned in this book, you can create complex applications without all the various Web technologies.

This chapter takes a comprehensive look at Silverlight and its similarities to WPF. Many of the things you learned in Chapter 17 about layout and design will also apply to this chapter.

WHAT IS SILVERLIGHT?

Microsoft introduced Silverlight in September 2007 as a rich media plug-in alternative to other platforms like Flash, but Silverlight has quickly matured to a powerful rich internet application platform. Silverlight 3, introduced in July 2009, enables .NET developers to create powerful line-of-business (LOB) applications ...