Silverlight - Micorosoft's magic for RIA (Part 1)

Hi Friends, sorry for delay in new post. Actually, I was busy with some personal stuff. Today, I got time and going to discuss Silverlight.

Microsoft has released two versions of Silverlight: Silverlight 1.0 and Silverlight 2.0. Personally I don’t like Silverlight 1.0. The actual magic begins with Silverlight 2.0. So let’s start our journey with Silverlight 2.0.

Silverlight is a framework for building rich, browser-hosted applications that run on a variety of operating systems. Silverlight works its magic through a browser plug-in. When you surf to a web page that includes some Silverlight 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 Silverlight plug-in provides a far richer environment than the traditional blend of HTML and JavaScript that powers ordinary web pages.

Silverlight Vs. Flash
The most successful browser plug-in is Adobe Flash, which is installed on over 90 percent of the world’s web browsers. It’s perfectly reasonable for .NET developers to create web sites that use Flash content. However, doing so requires a separate design tool and a completely different programming language (ActionScript) and programming environment (Flex).

Silverlight aims to give .NET developers a better option for creating rich web content. Silverlight provides a browser plug-in with many similar features to Flash, but one that’s designed from the ground up for .NET. Silverlight natively supports the C# language and embraces a range of .NET concepts. As a result, developers can write client-side code for Silverlight in the same language they use for server-side code (such as C# and VB) and use many of the same abstractions (including streams, controls, collections, generics, and LINQ).

Features Silverlight 2.0:

(1) Lightweight download: In order to encourage adoption, Silverlight is installed with a small-size setup (about 4MB) that’s easy to download.

(2) 2D Drawing: Silverlight provides a rich model for 2D drawing. Best of all, the content you draw is defined as shapes and paths, so you can manipulate this content on the client side. You can even respond to events (like a mouse click on a portion of a graphic), which makes it easy to add interactivity to anything you draw.

(3) Controls: Developers don’t want to reinvent the wheel, so Silverlight is stocked with a few essentials, including buttons, text boxes, lists, and a grid. Best of all, these basic building blocks can be restyled with custom visuals if you want all of the functionality but none of the stock look.

(4) Animation: Silverlight has a time-based animation model that lets you define what should happen and how long it should take. The Silverlight plug-in handles the sticky details, like interpolating intermediary values and calculating the frame rate.

(5) Media: Silverlight provides playback of Windows Media Audio (WMA), Windows Media Video (WMV7 through WMV9), MP3 audio, and VC-1 (which supports high definition). You aren’t tied to the Windows Media Player ActiveX control or browser plug-in—instead, you can create any front end you want, and you can even show video in full-screen mode.

(6) The CLR: Most impressively, Silverlight includes a scaled-down version of the CLR, complete with an essential set of core classes, a garbage collector, a just-in-time (JIT) compiler, support for generics, threading, and so on. In many cases, developers can take code written for the full .NET CLR and use it in a Silverlight application with only moderate changes.

(7) Networking: Silverlight applications can call old-style ASP.NET web services (ASMX) or Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) web services. They can also send manually created XML requests over HTTP. This gives developers a great way to combine rich client-side code with secure server-side routines.

(8) Data binding: Although it’s not as capable as in its big brother, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Silverlight data binding provides a convenient way to display large amounts of data with minimal code. You can pull your data from XML or in-memory objects, giving you the ability to call a web service, receive a collection of objects, and display their data in a webpage—often with just a couple of lines of code.

Limitations Silverlight 2.0:
- Lack of database support (there’s no ADO.NET)
- No support for 3D drawing
- No printing
- No command model and few rich controls like trees and menus

For next part of this post, please visit Silverlight (Part 2).