What Is Silverlight?
Silverlight is a browser plug-in that allows rendering of elements described with XAML in a web browser. Currently, this browser plug-in supports several browsers and operating systems (Internet Explorer and Firefox on Windows; Firefox and Safari on Mac OS X). For example, Figure E-1 and Figure E-2 show the same HTML and Silverlight code running in Internet Explorer and Firefox, respectively. Figure E-3 shows it in Safari on Mac OS X. Silverlight supports both JavaScript and managed code (e.g., C# and Visual Basic) to interact with the XAML. At this writing, JavaScript Silverlight support is in beta (referred to as Silverlight 1.0) and the managed support is in alpha (referred to as Silverlight 1.1). Because Silverlight 1.1 is only in alpha, our examples use the more mature Silverlight 1.0 (JavaScript model).
Figure E-1. Silverlight in Internet Explorer (on Windows Vista)
Figure E-2. Silverlight hosted in Firefox (on Windows Vista)
Figure E-3. Silverlight hosted in Safari (on Mac OS X)
Hello, Silverlight
Showing XAML-based content in a browser is not revolutionary (WPF supports this out of the box, as discussed in Chapter 11). What is revolutionary is that Silverlight ...
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