- Where Does Silverlight Come From?
- Using Third-Party Plug-Ins
- Running on Multiple Platforms
- Making the Web Application Secure
- Introducing Silverlight.net
- What Do You Need to Run Silverlight?
- Updating Your Runtime-Automatically
- Trying Silverlight Demos
- What Do You Need to Develop Silverlight?
- Reading the Documentation
- Looking into Silverlight's Future
- Summary
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Reading the Documentation
This book does not contain a full reference documentation about Silverlight but will give you a great head start in this technology. In addition, you will use the Silverlight documentation, available in various forms.
Browsing the Online Reference
The official Silverlight reference is found on MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) online. You can start at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb404710(VS.95).aspx (for Silverlight 1.0) and http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb404700(VS.95).aspx (for Silverlight 2).
Finding More Documentation
With the number of classes available in the .NET framework (and even in the Silverlight subset), and with the number of members that each class contains, a comprehensive documentation is a key factor when you program against this framework. Microsoft released a Silverlight 2 Software Development Kit (SDK). It contains technical documentation, libraries and tools to help you in your Silverlight experience.
- Navigate to the Get Started page at http://silverlight.net/GetStarted
- Scroll down until you see the link to Microsoft Silverlight 2 SDK. Follow this link and download the SDK setup file.
- Execute the file “silverlight_sdk.exe” you just downloaded. This will extract the content to C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Silverlight\v2.0
- For more information about the SDK, technical documentation, links to external resources, etc., check the “Welcome” page. You find it in your Start menu, under “All Programs / Microsoft Silverlight 2 SDK”.
The Silverlight documentation is also available as a compiled HTML file that can be installed locally (see Figure 1.7). The download link is on the SDK welcome page.
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Figure 1.7 Silverlight documentation
The Search tab allows you easy access to a specific topic. The documentation contains many interesting topics, and it is absolutely worth browsing through it.
Learning with Tutorials
Many tutorial websites are available for WPF, Silverlight, and Blend. The community website Silverlight.net has already been mentioned. Another exciting and innovative site is the Nibbles Tutorials website at www.nibblestutorials.net.
This website does an amazing job of presenting and teaching the technology. Using small, bite-sized tutorials, the Nibbles website allows you to test some of the knowledge acquired in this book.
Additionally, the website’s author, Celso Gomes, is a talented graphics designer working for Microsoft, and his tutorials give you the designer’s point of view on Silverlight (while this book gives you the developer’s point of view).