Chapter 9: Creating Enhanced User Experiences for SharePoint with Silverlight
What You’ll Learn In This Chapter:
- Getting to know Silverlight
- Understanding why you should integrate Silverlight with SharePoint
- Understanding how you can integrate SharePoint and Silverlight
Thus far, you’ve seen some discussion on Silverlight, but this book really hasn’t delved deeply enough into the topic to give you a feeling for its true power. For example, in Chapter 3 you learned how it is possible to embed Silverlight within your master page to improve the look and feel of your site with some advanced branding techniques. You learned how to use Expression Blend as a way to create a more complex Silverlight-based application and user interface (UI) that work in concert with Visual Studio to really evolve your SharePoint 2010 applications. However, you have barely scratched the surface with these topics. There is so much more that is possible with the integration of Silverlight and SharePoint.
This chapter provides an introduction to Silverlight, so you’ll begin to see why integrating the two technologies is so compelling. You’ll also see that there are three main ways (or classifications) of integrating Silverlight with SharePoint — and it is these three “levels” of integration that will guide how you create the pattern for bringing these two technologies together.
Understanding Silverlight
As of this writing, Silverlight has just been released in version 4. Silverlight 4 has some incredibly ...
