Silverlight™ 4 For Dummies®

Chapter 2. Getting Started in Silverlight

In This Chapter

• Creating your first Silverlight application

• Seeing what you can do with Expression Blend

• Creating a user interface with Extensible Markup Language (XAML)

• Running the application in Visual Studio

• Understanding the various files involved in creating a Silverlight application

So, you're fired up about creating your first Silverlight application. Great, but first make sure that you have the applications described in Chapter 1 installed. At the very minimum, you need Expression Blend, Visual Studio 2010, and the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio.

You can create Silverlight applications using either Visual Studio or Expression Blend. If you are a developer, at this point you would most likely get things under way using Visual Studio 2010, but in this chapter, we start with Expression Blend. As we tell you in Chapter 1, Expression Blend provides a much better environment for creating user interfaces than Visual Studio does. Also, if you are new to development, you're more likely to find Expression Blend easier to use for that purpose.

In this chapter, you find out how to create simple Silverlight applications using both Expression Blend and Visual Studio. In the course of creating these applications, you can also become more familiar with using both applications.

Keeping up with tradition, we start by creating a "Hello, World" application.

Getting Started in Silverlight with Expression Blend

When you start Expression Blend for the first ...