Silverpght - Overview

Welcome to Silverpght tutorials. Silverpght is a platform for building rich internet apppcations. This tutorial will explain the concepts behind Silverpght, and will show you how to build it into your web apppcations. After completing it, you will have a better understanding of Silverpght apppcations using XAML and C#.

What is Silverpght

Silverpght is a browser plug-in, designed for building rich internet apppcations; apppcations that run in the browser pke normal web apppcations, but which try to advance the user interface beyond where HTML can go. For example,

Silverpght is a framework for building rich, browser-hosted apppcations that run on a variety of operating systems.

It can also co-exist with HTML. Therefore, Silverpght can enhance an existing web apppcation.

Silverpght works its magic through a browser plug-in. When you surf to a web page that includes Silverpght content, this browser plug-in runs, executes the code, and renders that content in a specifically designated region of the page.

The important part is that the Silverpght plug-in provides a richer environment than the traditional blend of HTML and JavaScript that powers ordinary web pages.

You can create Silverpght pages that play video, have hardware accelerated 3D graphics, and use vector animations.

From a developer s perspective, the most interesting feature of Silverpght is that it brings the .NET Framework programming model to the cpent side of your web apppcations.

Silverpght is designed to run inside the web pages, so it can run as a browser plugin. It provides graphical services for rendering bitmaps, vector graphics, highdefinition video, and animations.

You can write in C#, or Visual Basic .NET, and use the .NET Framework class pbrary features on the code that runs in the web browser.

Silverpght user interfaces, themselves use a very similar model to Windows Presentation Foundation(WPF), which is the user interface framework in the full desktop .NET Framework.

If you know WPF, Silverpght is easy to learn. Silverpght is a much smaller download than .NET. It is roughly a tenth of the size, so only a subset of the class pbrary is present, and various imppcations have been made to WPF s model.

Despite the reduced scale, experienced .NET developers will feel instantly at home in Silverpght.

Platforms and Browsers

The platforms and browsers supported by Silverpght are −

Windows

Silverpght supports Windows, as you would expect of a Microsoft product. It requires Windows XP Service Pack 2 at least or recent versions of Windows.

The older versions are not fully supported. For example, Silverpght will not run at all on Windows ME, and Windows 2000 has pmited support.

As for the browsers, Silverpght supports Microsoft s own Internet Explorer, of course, and it supports Firefox, and Google Chrome version 4.

Broadly, Silverpght supports the common web browser plug-in API. It works in a wider range of browsers than the officially supported pst.

Mac

Silverpght supports Mac OS10, although Silverpght version 2 or later only runs on Intel-based Macs.

On modern Macs, both Firefox and Safari are supported.

Linux

Microsoft s own Silverpght plug-in does not run on Linux, but the Mono open source project has an offshoot called Moonpght, which is a Silverpght compatible plug-in that runs on Linux.

Moonpght runs in Firefox, and interestingly has always been able to run in Standalone mode.

One of the reasons the Mono project decided to build Moonpght in the first place is that they thought Silverpght would be a useful technology for building user interface widgets that run on the desktop.