Managed Programming in Silverlight 1.1 (Part I) (
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In the first of this new series on Silverlight 1.1 programming, Jeff Cogswell walks you through one of the examples that ships with the Silverlight alpha 1.1 SDK.
Silverlight! There’s been a lot of talk about it, including in our blogs her on DevSource, so don’t you think it’s time to get up to speed with it? In this article I get you started with Silverlight 1.1.
First, you might have read that there are two different versions of Silverlight. The first is 1.0, and as of this writing is on the verge of being officially released. (The Release Candidate version is out right now.) The other is 1.1, which is still in early development as an Alpha build.
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The main difference is that the 1.1 Alpha build lets you include managed .NET code along with it, code that directly interacts with the Silverlight control. But it’s not the usual .NET runtime; instead, it comes with its own smaller, self-contained version of .NET. (But don’t worry; it may be smaller, but it’s got a lot of features packed into it, including LINQ.)
In this and the following articles I’m steering away from just making flashy movies and graphics. Instead, I show you how to do some actual programming: Manipulating data structures in the runtime, accessing remote sites, and that kind of thing. (We'll even be doing some LINQ, as well as some remote XML retrieval! But that will be in a future article, so sit tight.)
What you need to begin
Before you can begin developing for Silverlight, you’ll need a few tools.
First, you’ll want the latest beta of Visual Studio 2008, previously known as Orcas.
And of course you'll need Silverlight 1.1. (Make sure you get 1.1, or you won't be able to run the examples.)
You'll also need the Silverlight 1.1 SDK. This includes all sorts of goodies, such as some good examples in its quickstarts directory.
Finally, you'll want the Silverlight Alpha Tools for Visual Studio 2008.
Important Note: If you installed your Alpha tools for Visual Studio prior to August 10, 2007, you’ll need to uninstall them and download and install the newer version. Otherwise you'll get a bunch of link errors when you try and build a project.
