Professional Silverlight® 4

Chapter 1. Introduction to Silverlight

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Overviewing Silverlight

• Getting the Silverlight Plug-In and SDK

• Taking a Silverlight 4 Tour

Silverlight 4, the fourth iteration of the Silverlight platform, continues to deliver on the promise of Adobe Flash–like and Flex-like rich Internet applications (RIAs) built using a standards-based, open approach with HTML and XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language) using tools like Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft Expression Blend. Silverlight 4 continues to add excitement to RIA development with the expansion of the capabilities of the Base Class Libraries (BCLs) from the .NET Framework, new user interface (UI) controls, and new libraries for building line-of-business applications. The result is that not only do you have the rich, XAML markup to describe expressive user interfaces, you have the power of the .NET Framework and your language of choice (C#, VB, etc.) to build Silverlight applications. Even with the .NET Framework libraries, Silverlight still retains the cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility that it has had since the beginning. This includes Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Macintosh, and, through the Mono Project, various Linux distributions. To give you an idea of the flexibility of the client and server scenarios, you can build a Silverlight application and run it in a Safari web browser on an Apple Macintosh, while being served up from an Apache web server running on Linux.

There ...