Silverlight入门教程[带源码下载]

Silverlight入门教程,由俄罗斯Andrey Baskov编程高手亲自撰写些文.文章层次结构清晰,叙述方式通俗易懂.特别适合作为Silverlight2入门的经典教程.

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Introduction

With this article, I want to start a Beginning Silverlight series in which I'll try to share with you my experience in such a great technology. I'll start with Silverlight basic principles and finish with some amazing Silverlight applications. Let's start step-by-step.

Using the Code

To use code from this article, you will need to install Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 and Microsoft Silverlight Tools Alpha for Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2. After installing them, simply open the CSPROJ file and run the project.

History Remark

To understand the reason why Microsoft decided to introduce one more internet technology, we should look at history. In the beginning, there was SGML and then, based on it, HTML. HTML was used and is still being used as a great markup language for presenting data. When computers became faster and users needed more interaction with simple pages, a JavaScript (also called ECMAScript) was introduced. Web pages grew bigger and more complex and needed frequent updating, so such technologies as PHP, ASP and ASP.NET were born.

However, while web applications got richer, they needed more effort to support that richness. AJAX is the last approach used to make applications again more beautiful and powerful. Now lots of companies and developers are faced with the troubles that this power brings. It's hard to maintain large amounts of weakly typed JavaScript code. Not only that, but in every browser type your web application looks different, if it even works there at all. Furthermore, debugging a web application, especially if it is AJAX enabled, can become a real headache (but thanks for ASP.NET, it's a great pill for this headache).

All of these obstacles prevent companies and developers from creating really big and powerful web applications targeted for any-browser users. So, what will help us with this mess? Yeah, you are right: Silverlight will be our saver :).

Silver… What?

So, what is Silverlight? I'll try to explain it in a few words. Silverlight is a Microsoft technology that allows you to make rich applications with nice interfaces that are executed in a browser. "And what?" you'll probably ask. Well, first of all, it's truly cross-platform and cross-browser. This means that if you write your application using Silverlight, it will run in such browsers as IE, Firefox, Opera (coming soon) and Safari. Not only that, but wherever you run your application it will look the same.

The second benefit that we will achieve with Silverlight (version 1.1) is that applications can be written using any .NET language (!). You can write your application in C#, VB.NET or even Ruby or Python. No more JavaScript! However, if you like coding in JavaScript, you also can use Silverlight in version 1.1. Application design is based on a new markup language called XAML (pronounced "zammel"). Silverlight XAML is a subset of the WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) XAML language. This means that once you've learned Silverlight, you can easily begin with WPF.

Versions

Today there are two known Silverlight versions: 1.0 and 1.1 Alpha Refresh. Version 1.0 is a start release that has XAML support and JavaScript for client-side coding. Version 1.1 is everything from 1.0 (this means programs that were written for 1.0 will run under Silverlight 1.1), plus .NET Framework. In these articles, I will target Silverlight 1.1 as the most interesting and exciting technology.