16.1. Creating Your First Rays of Silverlight

Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for putting rich, interactive media into Web pages. The plug-in's basic content is in the XAML markup language, an XML format that describes what to display. You create the trivial Silverlight application shown in Figure 16-1 with the Visual Web Developer text editor.

Figure 16-1. A handmade Silverlight application.

Almost everything that you need to get started with Silverlight in ASP.NET is available in a free download from Microsoft's Web site. Rather than advising you to type a ridiculous-looking (and possibly outdated) URL such as http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=FB7900DB-4380-4B0F-BB95-0BAEC714EE17&displaylang=en, I recommend searching for Silverlight Software Development Kit on Microsoft's Web site.

After downloading the .msi file, double-click the filename and follow the installer's prompts. If it offers to install templates for Visual Studio 2005, click Skip.

16.1.1. Setting up the Web project

Silverlight applications run inside a browser page and call on external JavaScript libraries. Follow these steps to set up the ASP.NET project to host a Silverlight plug-in.

  1. In Visual Web Developer, create a new Visual Basic file system Web site named

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