Professional Visual Studio® 2008

37.1. Silverlight

The first version of Silverlight focused on delivering the fundamentals needed to build Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). This included support for the rendering of raster and vector graphics, text, and animation, tracking and handling input, and streaming media (both audio and video). In a Silverlight 1.0 application, the user interface is defined using the XAML markup language and JavaScript is used to initialize the Silverlight plug-in instance.

Silverlight exposes a DOM API to the browser, which allows JavaScript code to manipulate the Silverlight UI and respond to events. This provides an easy way for those familiar with JavaScript to build Silverlight applications. However, at the same time, you are limited to the interactions and functions that you can build with JavaScript.

Silverlight 2 is a significant upgrade to version 1.0 and enables you to build Silverlight applications, including the code that drives their UI, using managed code that runs under the CLR. It does not require end users to have a full version of the .NET Framework installed on their computers; in fact even if you have a full version of .NET installed it won't be used by Silverlight. Instead, when you install the Silverlight 2 runtime, it will install a lightweight version of the .NET Framework and base classes. Lightweight means that not every class that is available in the full version is included; however, a surprising number of classes are available given the small 4.3MB size of ...