“Future sessions, we’ll have more code, more examples, more details, more…” Oh boy, we have to only wait; alas! Fellas, can we have 2 sessions a week, instead of 2 weeks - à session? Am I too excited – Silverlight. Sure I yaam.
[Psychologists state that, their patients say a Yes/OK – simply to show an assertive behaviour while answering questions (even if they're not understanding the question). That’s why these Docs choose questionaries with multi choice answers: as a better way for patients' input – for more accuracy.]
“Vik: who’ll all blog on today’s Silverlight session.” (Man I did the same – what patients generally do. Put my hand up in the air.)
I promised to write one, and I didn’t know I did! But “Koi nai”; I'm lovin’ it now!
I forgot to mention, it's is my life’s first Blog! And I am very hopeful that the reader would be enjoying it like I did, writing. Now you know, why so excited…
Background:
Vik is Technical Evangelist Infragistics India, and the above conversations are from a User Group meeting @ B.NET (Bangalore .NET User Group)] on 27th Sept 2008, Saturday.
The UG Session:
Well to those of the folks, who couldn’t make it to our first Silverlight session; let’s see what we had in the Start Tour of Silverlight:
Vik walked us through a very smooth path for get started with Silverlight. Let me try to summarise the important points from the session:
First of all, to build a Silverlight application – you’ll need these softwares:
- Visual Studio 2008.
If you’d like to update to the latest version, you may want to install VS 2008-SP1 (released on 11th of Aug, this year). I’ll assume you have this and won’t give you a download link :). - Microsoft® Silverlight™ Tools for Visual Studio 2008
This is an Add-on to Visual Studio 2008 SP1 required for developing Silverlight 2 applications. For the earlier versions, it was called silverlight_chainer.exe. The latest version is Silverlight 2 RC0; (the current you'd see is named as Silverlight_Tools.exe).
[Note: RC0 is still a developer release, so don’t forget to read this. Also for this version you’ll need the SP1 of Visual Studio]. You can download these Tools here. - Microsoft Expression Blend.
What’s this Expression Blend? Our Wiki introduces this guy so:
Microsoft Expression Blend is Microsoft's user interface design tool for creating graphical interfaces for web and desktop applications that blend the features of these two types of applications. Expression Blend is itself written using the .NET Framework 3.0 and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) [1]. Expression Blend is effectively an interactive, WYSIWYG front-end for designing XAML-based interfaces for WPF and Silverlight (Blend version 2.0 onwards).
If you are not an “I know XAML enough already”, then its best to use Blend. The latest version of Blend is here. - Others (Advanced users):
Furthermore, people who’d like to try Deep Zooming capability: you can download and install Deep Zoom composer.
You’d not need this tool presently, while starting. But a quick description of what this “DZ” is:
Microsoft Silverlight 2 includes support for the Deep Zoom technology created by the Live Labs SeaDragon team. In a nutshell, the deep zoom technology allows you to view large images by only sending to your browser the portion of the image that you will actually be viewing on your screen. You also have the ability to pan and zoom across your image very smoothly. This is very similar to how online maps (Live Earth, etc.) work by cutting a large image across many smaller images and only sending to your screen the tiles of images that are relevant to what you will be seeing.
[Please note:
I have included the links for the latest versions for all the required softwares, which I’d recommend you to try. You can still find the previous versions – on the official websites.]
Once you have these softwares, the next best thing to do is – get started! If you missed our session, you missed a lot! But, there’s still life saver jacket! I’d like to drive you to some of the best links to do so (instead of re-painting the same stuff here).
How to start:
- A very nice Video session, similar to the one we had – can be found here; on the official Silverlight Website.
It’s a 13 minutes Video by Tim Heuer. Tim’s one of the core guys in Silverlight development team. It’s very good video and I recommend – see it. - For those of you who'd prefer reading over videos – you can refer to this getting started article by Scott Guthrie, another great man from the Silverlight Team. You get started here, and I’m sure then you’ll have a problem stopping yourself from Silverlight.
The session by Vic, “Introduction” itself was quite a good (educative) session, we're sure to expect a lot of fun–n–learn with Vic’s future Silverlight sessions. Cheers! We’d thank Vicky for the session and definitely look forward for more!
Recommended reading:
If you’d like to tune in to “The Latest” updates on Silverlight, be with these gentlemen: Tim and Scott. Some of the most recent articles that I’d recommend reading – is this one by Scott, and another one by Tim.
So, I’ve summarised in this post – some of the most important points from our UG session, and also provided some more useful links and information for a quick quickstart; though you can always find all the information (and in-fact more) on the official sites, I thought I’d give something that I needed when I was starting.
I hope this small article – people liked and enjoyed, and it has added value to you. I’d appreciate very much if you can spend a few seconds more, and leave your comment. Thanks!
