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Keyboard Input Tricks for Silverlight 2
Jon Galloway discusses the challenges and solutions to handling keyboard input in Silverlight including:
  • Silverlight not firing the KeyDown event for cursor (arrow) keys
  • The difference between Key and PlatformKey
  • The missing Key Enumeration
  • How to create a keyboard handler event
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    Enter the RIA Run contest to build a next generation game using Microsoft Silverlight 2 and you could win an Xbox 360 or other fabulous prizes. Hurry! You only have until May 15, 2008 to show off your stuff to the world!

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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

    Page 1 of 7
      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 
    Show Off Your Silverlight 2 Skills
    Enter the RIA Run challenge and showcase your knowledge of Silverlight 2 to the world—and maybe even win a prize. By taking advantage of Silverlight 2 features, such as layout manager support, two-way data-binding support, etc., show the world what you can do with the most advanced RIA platform today.

    » Check out the contest today!