Microsoft 9GD00001 manual Starting a Silverlight Project, Key Skills & Concepts

286Microsoft Visual Studio 2010: A Beginner’s Guide

Key Skills & Concepts

●Start a New Silverlight Project

●Work with the Silverlight Designer

●Add Controls to an Application

●Play Silverlight Videos

●Deploy Silverlight Applications

Silverlight is a Web technology that allows you to add a rich user experience to Web applications. It uses XAML, just like WPF applications, but runs in a Web page

supported by ASP.NET.

Other parts of this book prepare you for working with Silverlight. Since Silverlight

uses XAML, you can review Appendixes A and B to get up-to-speed on XAML essentials. Silverlight also has many features in common with WPF. Therefore, it would be useful to review Chapter 8 before reading this chapter. What you’ll learn in this chapter is how VS helps you create a Silverlight project, how to add controls to the Silverlight designer, and how to deploy Silverlight applications.

Starting a Silverlight Project

As when starting other projects, you can select File New Project or press CTRL-SHIFT-N; you then select a Silverlight application in the New Project window. After you set up the project with a name and folder, VS will display another window for configuring the Silverlight application, shown in Figure 10-1.

Silverlight gives you the option to create a Web site at the same time as you create the Silverlight application. You can opt not to create the Web site, but ultimately, you’ll need to host your Silverlight application on a Web page. There is an alternate Web technology based on ASP.NET Web forms, but this book concentrates on the ASP.NET MVC Web development model, discussed in Chapter 9, which is why you see the New Web project type set to ASP.NET MVC Web Project. Click OK to create the Silverlight application, shown in Figure 10-2. You’ll also see a screen asking if you want to create a unit test project, which is the same window discussed in Chapter 9. Click OK to continue.