Part 1. Core Silverlight

When you’re learning a new technology, it’s always a good idea to start at the core: the core concepts, the core features, the core technologies, and the core skills. Taking that as a given, the first six chapters of this book will get you the grounding you need to learn about Silverlight and make good decisions about how you write your applications.

In the first chapter, you’ll learn what Silverlight is and how it fits into the developer platforms offered by Microsoft. You’ll spend the remainder of the chapter building your very first Silverlight application. Believe me, it won’t be a boring old “Hello World!”

XAML is the XML-based approach to defining the UI for Silverlight, WPF, Windows Phone, and Windows 8 XAML applications. These chapters take a deep look into XAML so that you’ll understand how it works, how to handle namespaces, how to map objects into XAML, and much more.

Silverlight differs substantially from other client and web technologies when it comes to its application model and how the plug-in integrates with the system. It’s essential and interesting to learn how all the pieces fit together, so I’ll cover that next.