Silverlight™ 3 Programmer's Reference

Chapter 3. Silverlight Architectural Tour

Before diving too deeply into any one particular area of Silverlight 3, it'll be helpful to get an overall understanding of its architecture — the core building blocks, frameworks, and execution environments. In this chapter, you'll take a look at these and come away with a high-level understanding of Silverlight capabilities along with a good grasp of how all the pieces fit and play together.

Figure 3-1 gives a very high-level overview of the layout of a Silverlight application with respect to major Silverlight architectural layers. Of course, Silverlight lives as a plug-in inside a browser host. There is then a presentation core layer that takes care of both presenting and animating visuals (images, text, video, and audio), as well as receiving input from the user in the form of keyboard, mouse, or ink. It's also responsible for the Digital Rights Management (DRM) capabilities of Silverlight.

Figure 3.1. Figure 3-1

On top of the presentation core, Silverlight includes .NET features, chiefly the Common Language Runtime (CLR), which is the execution environment for the .NET code (as it is with standard .NET applications). It's sometimes called the CoreCLR, as it is a selected subset deemed to be the core necessary for Silverlight applications. And on this CLR hang all of the various .NET-based libraries that developers can use to create rich, ...