Visual Studio® 2010 All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter 11. Writing Silverlight Applications

In This Chapter

• Exploring Silverlight for Visual Studio 2010

• Adding content to your Web application

• Enhancing your application with interactive content

Microsoft Silverlight is the latest platform for developing visually rich content for Web applications. Silverlight integrates multimedia, graphics, animation, and interactivity all into one cross-platform and cross-platform runtime environment. Search engines can index and search Silverlight content because Silverlight applications aren't compiled, but are declared in the Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) format files. These XAML files are interpreted by the Silverlight runtime when executed by the browser. Starting with Silverlight 2, you can develop Silverlight applications using any .NET language. This feature makes it easy for developers to apply their .NET framework development skills to develop enhanced Web applications with Silverlight. You can also develop Silverlight applications with dynamic scripting languages, such as Ruby and Python.

Silverlight has also become the tool of choice for delivering multimedia content on the Web. Silverlight supports all the major audio and video formats and appears in a majority of Web sites that deliver radio, television shows, and even movies. With Silverlight 3, you can even deliver high-definition video over the Web. Silverlight lets you watch your favorite television episodes that you missed or try out new shows when it's most convenient ...