Getting Started With Silverlight ...

 Not only that, but it runs in the three major browsers (Firefox, Safari and IE) and more amazingly on the three major operating systems, with Microsoft supporting Windows and Mac OS X and Novell’s Mono project providing a Linux runtime.

This article explains a little of the history behind Silverlight and what you can use it for. You’ll see how easy it is to get started, and then you’ll actually practice using a free InnerWorkings coding challenge featuring a sample app that demonstrates how to use and transform video in Silverlight.
Silver-what?

Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere (WPF/E) was announced two years ago at the 2005 PDC (Professional Developer Conference), but kept a low profile for a long time. At Mix ’07 in May however, the first 1.0 beta was released under the Silverlight name, along with (a little confusingly) a preview of the 1.1 release.

Version 1.0 has now been officially released and can display vector graphics, animations and high quality video (up to 720p, the low-end of HD). You can program it using a subset of WPF’s XAML syntax, using JavaScript to provide interactivity.

Version 1.1 however – still in technical preview stage – is what’s got everyone excited. Much more than a minor revision, this adds a bite-sized CLR to the plug-in, capable of executing compiled C#, VB, Python and Ruby code. Though it is cut-down, the Core CLR still provides a just-in-time compiler and works with the exact same assemblies as the full-blown desktop CLR. If you can restrict yourself to the smaller set of classes included with Silverlight’s CLR, there is complete compatibility between the two, with no re-compilation necessary.
How does Silverlight work?

From a user’s point of view, the experience is designed to be as smooth as possible. On visiting a Silverlight-enabled site for the first time, a message appears inviting the user to download the plug-in from the Microsoft site. The install is quick and painless, although it can require a browser restart. After that, any Silverlight content is displayed automatically and the plug-in even updates itself as required.

The Silverlight SDK makes this experience easy by providing a JavaScript file that detects the plug-in’s presence and either just displays the content or prompts the user to install. The JavaScript also provides a way to display Silverlight content without worrying about the different expectations of the supported browsers.

The actual “scene” is defined in XAML, an XML-based format where elements and attributes correspond to .NET objects and their properties. This is the same XAML that powers WPF, just with some of the elements missing.

What’s left, at least in Silverlight 1.0, is enough to draw shapes, images, text and video. Some of the flexible layout options from WPF (like the Grid, DockPanel and StackPanel) are missing, along with any kind of prebuilt UI control – there are no buttons, menus, listboxes or anything. Though you can use HTML controls instead, this is a major shortcoming, and the Silverlight team have promised some of these controls for a future release of version 1.1, along with a set of panels to make layout easier.

To build an app that does more than just look pretty, you can attach event handlers to Silverlight objects and write code that manipulates the scene, starting animations, controlling video or audio playback and updating the properties of objects. Silverlight really does behave like a mini-WPF, so if you’re familiar with its big brother (or Windows Forms or ASP.NET for that matter), the programming model is easy to follow.
Silverlight

When you strip away the helper JavaScript files, very little is required to display Silverlight content in a browser that has the plug-in installed. The snippet below uses inline XAML to reference content defined in the HTML file, but you can just as easily use a file located on your web server (or one generated dynamically by ASP.NET).

Other than the XAML script tag, the snippet contains an object tag that actually creates an instance of the Silverlight control, passing it a reference to the XAML it should use (in this case preceded by the # symbol to specify the ID of the HTML element with the content). That’s it.
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<body>
   <script type="text/xaml" id="xamlContent">
       <Canvas xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/client/2007">
           <TextBlock Text="Hello, Silverlight!" />
       </Canvas>
   </script>
   <object id="silverlightObj" type="application/x-silverlight" width="200" height="200">
       <param name="source" value="#xamlContent" />
   </object>
</body>
</html>
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