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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 (cont'd)
More Resources
  • MSDN: Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
        Downloads
  • Free Trial: Microsoft Expression Blend 2

    • Obtaining the Tools
    To develop Silverlight applications, you'll need to obtain the following runtimes/tools:

    Runtimes
    To view Silverlight applications on your browser, download one or all of the following:

    The ASP.NET Futures download contains new controls for ASP.NET that support Silverlight applications.

    Developer Tools
    The easiest way to get started with Silverlight development is to use Visual Studio 2008, currently available for download as Beta 2. You can download Visual Studio 2008 here.

    Once you have downloaded and installed Visual Studio 2008, you also need to download the Microsoft Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio, which is an add-on to Visual Studio 2008 for creating Silverlight applications. Installing it will add the following items to Visual Studio 2008:

    • Visual Basic and C# Project templates
    • IntelliSense and code generators for XAML
    • Debugging of Silverlight applications
    • Web reference support
    • Integration with Expression Blend
    In addition, you can download one or more of the following professional tools to help design your Silverlight applications: Finally, you can download the following SDKs containing documentation and sample code:
    Previous Page: Introduction Next Page: Getting Started
    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)