Beginning DotNetNuke® Skinning and Design

Chapter 10. Exploring Silverlight

Microsoft Silverlight is a new in-browser technology that adds rich interactive features to websites. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are great tools, but they can only take a web page so far as a document. Silverlight provides a way to embed audio and video in a page that goes far beyond the capabilities of Windows Media Player. JavaScript can automate the functionality inside the Silverlight object model, too. Silverlight is an exciting way to learn more about rich interactive applications inside DotNetNuke. This chapter gives you a nickel tour of the technology.

The ubiquitous nature of video today makes it a compelling idea for your website. Video recorders are common in households, and many mobile phones even have video recording features. The source of video content is deep. This chapter takes advantage of the video resources available to you and applies it to the DotNetNuke site. In this chapter, you'll use Silverlight to perform the following tasks:

• Build the compulsory Hello World application in Silverlight

• Animate basic shapes on an HTML page

• Extend a DotNetNuke skin by adding an image rotation component through animation

• Build a custom video player with control buttons and video library

Getting Started with Silverlight

The Silverlight software development kit (SDK) is available online at the following URL:

www.microsoft.com/silverlight/tools.aspx

The SDK includes a lot of information such as samples, tutorials, help files, and tools for Visual Studio. ...