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by
kirupa | 22 March 2008
At the MIX conference in
2008, Microsoft released a Beta version of
Silverlight 2. 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.
This article discusses software
that is still under development, so the information contained here may change in
the future.
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.
The following
image from Wikipedia gives you a good overview
of the numerous pieces that Silverlight 2 is made up
of and provides support for:
As you can see,
Silverlight 2 is pretty powerful. This power allows
casual visitors to view richer applications in their
browser that would otherwise not be possible, but
more importantly (and what this site is all about)
it allows designers and developers to more easily
create killer content using the Expression Studio
and Visual Studio products that they are already familiar
with.
Getting started with designing and coding
Silverlight 2 applications is pretty
straightforward. The following list gives you a good
start:
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Windows Vista or Windows XP Development
Machine
While users can view
Silverlight 2 content on Windows, Mac, and
Linux operating systems, for developing your
Silverlight 2 applications, you will need to
be running a recent Windows-based OS.
The reason is that applications found in
Visual Studio and Expression Studio run only
on Windows.
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Visual Studio 2008 Standard or Higher
For developing Silverlight 2 applications,
you will need Visual Studio 2008 Standard or
higher. Currently, the free Express editions
of Visual Studio do not support Silverlight
2 development - yet.
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Expression Blend 2.5 Preview
For designing Silverlight 2 applications,
you will need the preview version of
Expression Blend 2.5. You can download it
for free by clicking
here.
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Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio
2008
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.
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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 the preview version of Blend 2.5 and the
Silverlight Tools. With those apps installed, you
are now ready to start building Silverlight 2 apps!
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
