Silverlight: A Guide to Installation 21 January 2010

Silverlight for Liberal Arts Majors

1: Installing Silverlight and Visual Studio

While installing Silverlight and Visual Studio is relatively simple, the fact of the matter is that the software required for the development environment is massive and takes a very long time to download, even on a fast, dedicated internet connection. If your computer is getting old — Windows ME or earlier — or you have a slow, unreliable, or shared internet connection, it is strongly encouraged that you find a newer computer, a better connection, a download manager of some kind that will protect against the loss of data due to loss of connection, or even request a CD-version of the software involved.

Required Software

1. Silverlight [link] — Perhaps the most important component of all: the Silverlight plugin itself. How can you expect to develop an awesome Silverlight application if you can’t test the thing?
2. Visual Web Developer [link] — Students, please skip to the following section “DreamSpark”. — Visual Web Developer is the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) wherein you will be developing your applications. Express Edition (the free one) is all that is required for Silverlight development — though feel free to update to Professional Edition.
   - OR -
   Visual Studio Tools (for pre-existing install) [link] — If you already have Visual Studio installed your system, you will need these additional components in order to develop Silverlight effectively.
3. Silverlight Toolkit [link] — A selection of Silverlight tools, controls, components, and utilities for development purposes. Includes source code and demos.

In addition to the above programs, which are necessary for Windows-based Silverlight development, there are a number of additional programs which can come in handy for further development. These include: the .NET RIA Services, the Deep Zoom Composer, and Microsoft Expression Blend 3 + SketchFlow (not free; students, see DreamSpark below). Though these programs will not be required to follow the tutorials in this guide, you may wish to experiment with the capabilities of these powerful tools as your programs become more advanced.

DreamSpark: Students and Free Software

Microsoft’s DreamSpark program is intended to provide current high school and college students with access to professional software development programs that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive. Currently available are: Visual Studio 2008 Professional, 2005 Professional, 2010 Ultimate Beta 2; Expression Studio 2, 3; SQL Server 2008; Windows Server 2003, 2008 (32- and 64-bit); Robotics Developer Studio 2008 Academic Edition; XNA Game Studio; and so forth.

In order to verify their student status, new users must provide one of several forms of identification, including university (.edu) email addresses, national student identification cards, ISIC, and federated identity. For more information, and to sign up for the DreamSpark program, please visit the website: http://www.dreamspark.com/.

Students wishing to follow this guide should install: Visual Studio 2008 Professional, Expression Studio 3, and the Silverlight plug-in (see previous section for link).

Version Information

As of the time of writing, the most current version of Silverlight is Silverlight 3. (Silverlight 4.0 is currently in beta testing.) Silverlight 4 can only be developed in Visual Studio 2010. This guide will assume that you are using Visual Studio 2008 and Silverlight 3.

Silverlight for Liberal Arts Majors 21 January 2010

Silverlight for Liberal Arts Majors

a guide to developing Silverlight applications for non-programmers

For the longest time, Macromedia Flash has dominated a very specific and prolific part of the internet experience: multimedia. The majority of free online games, for example, are coded in Flash. Those cool-looking dynamic menus, with the funky special effects and sound? Probably Flash. Almost 90% of those annoying flashing/noisy/dancing girl/shoot-the-fill-in-the-blank advirtisements? YouTube videos? Animation? Many Disney film websites? Definitely Flash.

In April 2007, Microsoft unveiled a new competitor to Flash. It was called Silverlight, and, as a whole, the internet development community sat up and gave notice. Not only was this a viable competitor for the 11-year-old Flash technology, but it could be built on top of a back-end system that ran on any of the .NET languages (C#, F#, VB.Net, &tc.) The built-in graphics looked like the traditional Windows graphics, there was a robust development community, and a new release averaged approximately 6 months. And the best part? Developers and users were not limited to Windows machines.

This is the first in a series of articles that attempts to introduce the casual programmer (or non-programmer) to the amazingly simple idea of Silverlight development. Whether you want a small calendar to display the date and today’s tasks on your website, or a full-fledged side-scrolling jet fighter game, this guide is designed to make your learning as painless as possible.

Please note that the guide is currently in development. Expect frequent and rapid changes as new articles are written, old ones are rearranged, and so on.

Table of Contents

(the following listing is subject to change)

1. Installing Silverlight and Visual Studio
2. Silverlight: the overview
3. The .NET languages: a crash course and overview
4. XAML overview
5. Capturing events
6. Multimedia and rich content
7. Samples and projects
8. Bibliography, sources, and further reading

Appendices

A. Developing Silverlight in Linux
B. Browser, OS, and other compatibility information