Chapter 1. Introducing Silverlight

 

This chapter covers

  • Silverlight, the web, and WPF
  • The best applications for Silverlight
  • Getting started with Silverlight
  • Changes in Silverlight since the previous edition of this book
  • Building your first Silverlight “Hello World!” application

First, let me thank you for starting at chapter 1. I’m one of those people who tend to read magazines back to front and skim technology books, so I appreciate it when someone reads a book’s chapters in order. Then again, maybe you read this book backward as well. In that case, you’ll find the “Hello World!” walkthrough in this chapter to be a refreshingly simple take on building Silverlight applications unencumbered with patterns such as Model View ViewModel (MVVM), words such as DependencyProperty, and technologies such as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Rich Internet Application (RIA) Services. For the rest of you, don’t worry—we’ll cover each of those throughout the rest of the book, steadily building our Silverlight skills as we go.

1.1. A Silverlight primer

1.2. A brief history of Silverlight

1.3. Getting started with Silverlight development

1.4. Building your first Silverlight web application

1.5. Summary