Beginning Silverlight 2 - From Novice to Professional

Silverlight (previously code-named ‘WPF everywhere’ or ‘WPF/e’) is one of the biggest new technologies to be released by Microsoft in recent years. Interest in it amongst the Microsoft development community has been huge – dwarfing even that show for ASP.NET AJAX. A partially complete version of Silverlight (version 1.0) was released earlier this year without support for the .NET framework. A new version with full .NET support is being released early in 2008 and it is this complete version that is targeted in this book. The book takes people on a guided tour of all the new tools that are available to create Silverlight applications – from Expression Design and Expression Blend through to Visual Studio 2008. The book explains how each of the tools performs it’s part of the job of putting together well-constructed Silverlight application and demonstrates this with a series of straight-forward examples that illustrate how developers and designers can perform their roles in harmony. The book has a developer’s focus but takes an open approach so that readers are aware of what is happening on both sides of the fence – an essential concept to grasp in modern web development. By the end of the book readers will be well prepared to start creating Silverlight applications, both on their own or with the support of a design team.