Real World SharePoint® 2010: Indispensable Experiences from 22 MVPs

Chapter 13. Using Silverlight 4 with SharePoint 2010

By Karine Bosch

Released in April 2010, Silverlight 4 is an exciting and promising new technology. Silverlight is a browser plug-in that runs on the client and can render animations, audio, and video. To shorten the learning curve for the developer, Silverlight exposes a subset of the .NET Framework, but it is also able to execute JavaScript and interact with other elements on the HTML page.

SharePoint 2010 is tightly integrated with the familiar Microsoft Office applications and provides a consistent user experience that simplifies how people interact with content, processes, and business data. It offers a robust, out-of-the-box functionality to create large intranets, extranets, and public-facing sites.

Silverlight is heavily integrated in SharePoint 2010, and the client object model makes it easy to manage SharePoint data from within Silverlight.

In this chapter, you learn how to build a Silverlight application that displays items from a SharePoint list in a scrolling marquee, as shown in Figure 13-1. The first sample Silverlight application is hosted from within a web part. Later, you learn how to add the Silverlight application to the master page.

Figure 13-1. The Silverlight News Banner

You also learn how to build a custom field type and an application page to make managing SharePoint list items easier. Later in this chapter, you ...