Introduction to Silverlight 4
It is a
powerful development platform for creating rich media applications for the web,
desktop and mobile devices. It is a new cross-browser, cross-platform
implementation of the .Net Framework for building and developing the next
generation of media experiences and Rich Interactive Application for the web
users to provide a dynamic experience by using all stuffs like animation,
audio, video etc. It runs in all popular/modern browsers like Internet
Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome running on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS.
The very small plug-in requires to run Silverlight and it is freely available
on internet.
Silverlight
is combination of different technologies into a single development platform
that allows us to select tools and the programming language to use in
development. Silverlight can also be integrated into existing ASP.NET,
JavaScript or AJAX code to complete the functionality.
The
main aim of Silverlight is to compete with Adobe product ‘Flash’ and the
presentation components of AJAX. Website designers and developers alike can
find much to be excited about in Microsoft’s answer to Adobe Flash.
At very
first time Silverlight was called by very bored name ‘WPF/E’ (Windows Presentation
Foundation/Everywhere). After the MIX (MIX is a Microsoft conference held
annually for web developers and designers at which Microsoft showcases upcoming
web technologies) conference in March 2007, a new name ‘Silverlight’
introduced.
The main
advantage of Microsoft’s platform, developer’s has option to choose his
development language. The same in Silverlight, developer can chose either
VB.NET or C#.NET to develop Silverlight based apps.
Versions of Silverlight
Silverlight
1
Silverlight1
was the very first version after the MIX conference. Version 1 was released in
September 2007. This version was made up of the following components:
§ UI Core: Managing the rendering
of bitmap, jpeg, vector graphics, text and animations.
§ Media: Audio support like mp3,
wma, wmv7, wmv8 and wmv9/vc-1
§ Input: Handling input from
keyboard, mouse etc
§ XAML: Pronounced as “Zammel”,
to allow the UI creating using XAML markups
Silverlight
1.1 (also referred as Silverlight2)
When
version 1.1 was released in October 2007, it was rebranded (renamed) as version
2. In addition with many updates in this version, Silverlight 2 includes Deep
Zoom technology. This technology allows users to zoom into, or out of, an image
with smooth transitions using the mouse wheel.
Silverlight
3
This
version was introduced in early 2009 and the final version was released in 9
July 2009.
Silverlight
4
On
November 18, 2009 at the Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft
introduced beta version of Silverlight4 and the final version was released on
April 15, 2010. New features in this version include:
§ Support for Google's
Chrome browser.
§ Web cam and microphone support.
§ Printing support.
§ Improved mouse support
including right button support and mouse wheel support.
§ New notification support to
display messages to end users.
§ New and enhanced controls such
as a RichTextBox and an enhanced DataGrid control.
§ New support for implicit
theaming of controls.
§ New hosted browser support for
rendering HTML inside Silverlight.
§ WCF data layer enhancements.
§ Localization enhancements with
bi-directional text.
§ Support for Managed
Extensibility Framework.
§ Enhanced data binding support.
§ Enhanced animation effects.
§ Clipboard and drag and drop
support.
§ Deep Zoom performance
enhancements.
§ WCF Rich Internet
application (RIA) Services.
Silverlight
5
On
December 2, 2010 at the Silverlight Firestarter event, the beta version of Silverlight5
was announced for release in 2011. New features will be available with this
version includes
§ Supports GPU accelerated video
decoding
§ Built in 3D graphics support
(not to be confused with stereoscopic 3D)
§ Variable speed playback of media
content with automatic audio pitch correction
§ Improved power awareness
§ Built in Remote-control support
§ Supports faster application
startup
§ Provides 64-bit browser support
§ Automated UI testing support
for applications with Visual Studio 2010
§ Delivers improved text clarity
§ Developers can now debug
data-binding expressions, set breakpoints on bindings.
How to
run Silverlight in browsers?
As I
already have discussed above, Silverlight is an add-on to browsers, as does
Adobe Flash. It gets installed separately to browsers and adds functionality to
our browser to display web page and let us some new technology experience. This
add-on itself is around 6MB in size.
To run
Silverlight applications, we need a compatible web browser. When we point any
website which has Silverlight content, we get a small Install Microsoft
Silverlight Icon as given below:
Now to
install this, click on above icon to download and install. Alternatively, we
can download newest version of Silverlight add-on from websitehttp://www.silverlight.net/GetStarted.
We can
also update the existing installed add-on by navigating right clicking on any
Silverlight based website and navigating to updates option. Alternatively, we
can download newest version of Silverlight add-on from website http://www.silverlight.net/GetStarted and
re-install it.
Trying
some Demos of Silverlight
By
navigating on community website for Silverlight, we can find many demos developed
by third party developers or even many demos directly from Microsoft. Find the
following demos:
Demos
by Microsoft
Silverlight
enhanced website
Silverlight
enhanced website
Above
example brings up an interactive graphics. Creating a rich user interface for
any application such as above would be very difficult using plain coding.
Advantages
of Silverlight
· Supports Data Binding
· Supports Drawing of vector
graphics and 3D transformations
· Supports for creating
storyboards and animations
· Supports for using text boxes
and buttons and even creating own controls
· Layout Support
· Controls styling
· Change appearance of controls
· Supports video and audio share
via webcams and microphone
· Supports media streaming
· Supports to create applications
for windows and symbian based mobile phones
What do
we need to develop Silverlight?
Microsoft
provides all the programs needed to develop Silverlight applications.
Expression Blend (Expression Studio includes Expression Blend, Expression
Design, Expression Web, Expression Encoder etc.) and Visual Studio are the most
commonly and primary requirement. However, to start developing applications in
Silverlight 4, we need to install following programs and tools:
· Expression Blend 4 (It is available in trail
only, no any free edition)
· Visual Studio 2010 (Visual Web Developer
2010 is free)
· Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual
Studio 2010 (Freely available)
This software is responsible to
add necessary elements to get Visual Studio to build Silverlight applications,
these elements includes project templates, button & text boxes and the most
important one Silverlight SDK (Software Development Kit). It also offer
debugger support.
· Silverlight Toolkit (Freely available)
This includes the collection of
controls and utilities for Silverlight that supplements what is already present
in the core Silverlight libraries. This toolkit also includes controls such as
charts. Microsoft frequently updates this toolkit.
· Deep Zoom Composer (Freely available)
This helps in creating the
zooming and panning effects of images at runtime.
· WCF RIA Services (Freely available)
This focuses on the user
interface implementation, validating data, calculation, data reading and
writing etc.
Above
all tools and software is subject of change and updated information and
download links can be obtained always fromhttp://www.silverlight.net.
Role of
Expression Blend
As we
already have discussed that Expression Blend is part of a suite of applications
collectively known as Expression Studio. Although we can install just a single
application as need, but specially designers tend to install the entire suite
of the Expression Studio. These tools help the designer to design art visually.
Other applications in this suite are follows:
Expression
Design
This
application let the designer to design graphics and artworks for desktop and
web.
Expression
Web
This
application let the designer and developer to design, build and manage entire
website. It also supports CSS in creation of websites even it integrates with
ASP.NET and PHP level programming. Its Super Preview option let the developer
see how page will look in different browsers.
Expression
Encoder
This
application let the designer to prepare the media files such as video and audio
so that they can be used with Silverlight application.
Comments
Post a Comment