Programming .NET 3.5

The Breadth of Silverlight

Silverlight 2 offers a lot of features to support very rich interactive Internet applications. Some of the more important areas include:

Controls, events, and data

These three topics make up the heart of this chapter, so we'll defer discussion of them for now.

Media

Silverlight provides extensive support for both audio and video, including out-of-the-box media players. It also gives you the ability to use media, both interactively and combined with controls, to create new forms of compelling user interfaces.

Graphics

Silverlight 2's graphics capabilities are quite advanced. The use of vector graphics allows for significant scaling, the engines provided are high-performance, and the ability to integrate transformations with animation allows for the creation of unprecedented browser-hosted graphics.

Text and fonts

Silverlight enables the control and manipulation of fonts developed to allow WPF to provide a rich and rewarding interactive user interface. All of the transformation and animation effects available for graphic elements apply to text as well; taken together, Silverlight's manipulation and display of text are unprecedented for a cross-platform browser technology.

Streaming, syndication, and web services

Silverlight applications can be provided on the client, or they can be streamed to the browser from a Microsoft or other server. Silverlight also supports syndication (e.g., via RSS) and exports data that web services can consume easily.

Advanced programming ...