zahid's blog

I have been working on Silverlight since Silverlight 2 when there is now good designer tools  for developer. But now Silverlight 4 have become more matured and rich. To support silverlight application development faster Visual Studio 2010 introduce a Design View. Design view provides a visual design surface for building Silverlight controls and the layout of applications. It shows a rendering of the XAML currently in XAML view. If any changes make on the design surface, XAML view updates to reflect that changes.

I am going to share my experience in the journey of Silverlight with those who are willing to learn Silverlight but didn’t start yet. I will start from very basic so that absolute beginner can able to understand. It is a step-by-step article focus on some basic questions. Those who are already in the journey they will find some good resources which i have found after lots of Googling.

What is Silverlight?

According to Silverlight Document “Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform implementation of the .NET Framework for building and delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIA) for the Web. Silverlight unifies the capabilities of the server, the Web, and the desktop, of managed code and dynamic languages, of declarative and traditional programming, and the power of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).”

What's New in Silverlight 4?

In spite of some disabilities Silverlight 4 brings so many new Features for Application Developers. I am not going to let you know about all those exciting features.

You can find all the new features in MSDN or Silverlight and Silverlight 4 Beta – A guide to the new features

Silverlight Architecture?

Silverlight platform consist of two major parts (Core presentation framework and .NET Framework for Silverlight) and an installer and update component.

In order to understand how Silverlight application works we need to take a close look at the silverlight Architecture.

You will find more about the silverlight application’s Architecture form here

Prerequisites for Silverlight 4 application development

To begin with you will need to install Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Web Developer 2010 Express , and then install the Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010.( you will get Silverlight 3 in Visual Studio 2010 by default). You will get Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 from here.

When you install the Silverlight 4 Tools, the following components are installed.

· Silverlight 4 developer runtime
· Silverlight 4 SDK
· Updates to Visual Studio to support Silverlight 4 features
· WCF RIA Services

So if we are ready to develop our first application in Silverlight 4.

Open Visual Studio 2010 and Open a new project.
Open Visual Studio 2008 beta 2 and click File > New > Project; then choose Silverlight Project; enter the project name "FirstSilverlightApp" and click OK :

If we successfully installed the Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010, the option to target Silverlight 4 will appear.

A new standard Silverlight project is created. From the next post we will start from our first silverlight application and gradually we will explore Silverlight 4.