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Silverlight for the Enterprises—Fundamentals
Delivering business processing logic through RIA (Rich Internet Application) format is very attractive to architects, developers and operators of IT shops. RIA combines the richness of the desktop application with the ease of deployment, ubiquity and platform independence of the web application. RIAs in the form of mashups, are very popular in the consumer space but have yet to see similar success in the enterprise space. Enterprise applications are stateful and process-centric in nature. Read more
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Get Started with Silverlight Using Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend 2
The Microsoft Silverlight browser plug-in enables developers to host Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), which feature animation, vector graphics, and video playback. Find out how to get started with Silverlight, and get a feel for how this new type of development works. 

by Wei-Meng Lee
September 5, 2007  
More Resources
  • MSDN: Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
        Downloads
  • Free Trial: Microsoft Expression Blend 2

    • ver the years, we have all seen the proliferation of Web applications. In the early days, Web sites consisted of sets of static HTML pages, with nice graphics and lots of information. Then, server-side technologies like CGI, ASP, and JSP made Web applications possible and suddenly users were able do a lot of things on the Web, such as buying products online, performing reservations, etc. Client-side innovations, such as JavaScript, helped to improve the user experience of Web applications, making them feel much more responsive. Although AJAX's underlying technologies had been available for several years, it wasn't really until the last couple of years that people really started spending more time AJAX-enabling their Web applications. All this boils down to one important goal of Web developers—making Web applications much more interactive and responsive.

    Today, a new term has been coined—RIA, which stands for Rich Internet Applications. To Microsoft, RIA really stands for Rich Interactive Applications. And it is with this in mind that Microsoft recently launched a new technology/product known as Silverlight. Previously known as Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere (WPF/E), Microsoft Silverlight is a browser plug-in that enables developers to host Rich Internet Applications (RIA) that feature animation, vector graphics, as well as video playback.

    This article will help you get started with Silverlight and hopefully give you a good feel for how Silverlight development works.

    The State of Silverlight
    At the moment, there are two release versions of Silverlight: 1.0 and 2.0, the main difference being the support of .NET languages in version 2.0. For version 1.0, you have to use JavaScript for writing your application logic. In version 2.0, you can also use either C# or Visual Basic for your application logic, which is then executed by a version of the CLR built within the runtime.

    The Silverlight runtimes currently support the following browsers:

    • Internet Explorer 6/7
    • Firefox 1.5/2.0
    • Safari 2.0
    This article focuses on Silverlight 2.0.

    Download the code for this article: OurFirstSilverlightProject.zip

      Next Page: Obtaining the Tools
    Page 1: IntroductionPage 5: Writing the Logic Using Visual Basic
    Page 2: Obtaining the ToolsPage 6: Transformation
    Page 3: Getting StartedPage 7: Deploying Silverlight Applications
    Page 4: Building the User Interface Using XAML 
    Want to Know Who Won?
    We have a winner in the RIA Run contest! Check out the Contest Winners Gallery and see which entries took the top prizes. You can play the games, too! Also, be sure to check out our interview with the grand prize winner to see how he crafted his winning entry. (Silverlight 2 Beta 2 required)