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by
kirupa | 22 March 2008 (Updated 14 October 2008)
At the MIX conference in
2008, Microsoft released a Beta version of
Silverlight 2. Fast forward six months later, and in
October 2008, Silverlight 2 has been released. In a nutshell, Silverlight 2 is a
plug-in that allows users to view interactive
content inside their browsers. That's nothing
particularly new or interesting. We've had plug-ins
that do just that for a long time.
What is interesting is
how Silverlight 2 does it. Silverlight 2 is in in
many ways a subset of the WPF and .NET Framework
that many designers and developers are already
familiar with. When you take the more useful,
web-specific components out of the .NET Framework,
combine it with the media support and
designer-friendliness of WPF, and sprinkle several
dashes of Controls, Dynamic Languages, and a
high-performance Execution Engine, you have
Silverlight 2.
Getting started with designing and coding
Silverlight 2 applications is pretty
straightforward. The following list gives you the
applications and downloads you will need:
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Silverlight 2 Developer Runtime
The
developer runtime is a bit larger than the
one that everyone else downloads, and the
reason is that detailed error text and
additional debug information is provided for
you.
Otherwise, everything is the same, so do
download the developer runtime so that you
can more easily figure out why things don't
work as they should.
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Expression Blend 2
SP1
For designing Silverlight 2 applications on
a WYSIWYG design surface,
you will need
Expression Blend 2 SP1. You can download it
for free by clicking
here.
This is a service pack that runs on top
of Expression Blend 2, so if you don't have
Expression Blend 2 installed, download a
trial by
clicking here.
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Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Standard or Higher
For developing Silverlight 2 applications,
you will need Visual Studio 2008 Standard or
higher.
Also, after installation, install the
Service Pack for Visual Studio as well,
for the below Silverlight Tools require
them.
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Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio
2008 SP1
This
download provides Visual Studio with
everything it needs such as project
templates, intellisense, debugging, and more
to get you up and running for creating
Silverlight 2 applications.
Without
this, you will be unable to create
Silverlight 2 applications using Visual
Studio, and you will also not be able to
open Silverlight 2 projects created by, for
example, Expression Blend.
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Deep Zoom Composer (Optional)
One of the new features in Silverlight 2 is
the ability to visualize large quantities of
image data. In order to do this, you will
need to prepare your images into the Deep
Zoom format, and Deep Zoom Composer allows
you to do just that.
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Silverlight Toolkit (Optional)
The Silverlight Toolkit contains a lot of
controls developed by Microsoft that don't
always ship as a part of Silverlight or the
SDK.
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While the list seems
pretty daunting, if you are coming from a .NET or
WPF background, you probably already have most of
the prerequisites for Silverlight 2 development
already installed. The only things you may not have
is Blend 2 SP1 and the Silverlight Tools.
I hope the information helped.
If you have any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to post them on the
kirupa.com Forums. Just post your question and I, or our friendly
forum helpers, will help answer it.
The following is a list of related tutorial and help resources that you may find
useful:
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Getting Started with Silverlight 2
