Professional Visual Studio 2012

Chapter 23

Silverlight

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Creating your first Silverlight application
• Using the Navigation Framework
• Theming your Silverlight application
• Running a Silverlight application outside of the browser

Silverlight has been getting a lot of traction from within Microsoft and the developer community due to its huge potential as a development platform. New major versions are released regularly, demonstrating that it is progressing fast. At the time of writing, Silverlight had reached version 5, which is already showing a lot of maturity for a reasonably young technology, and although there has been nothing officially announced, it is likely that this is the last version of Silverlight (at least for a while).

In earlier versions of Visual Studio, it was quite a chore to configure the IDE for Silverlight development, requiring Service Pack 1 along with the Silverlight Tools to be installed just to start. Since Visual Studio 2010, Silverlight development is configured out-of-the-box, making it easy to start. Also, Visual Studio 2008 had no designer for Silverlight user interfaces (initially there was a preview view but this was later abandoned), requiring developers to write the XAML and run their application to view the results, or use Expression Blend if they had access to it (which did have a designer). This was improved in Visual Studio 2010, which included a capable designer that makes it much easier for developers to create user interfaces in Silverlight. It is ...