Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

Getting Started with Silverlight

analysis
May 4, 20072 mins

Shawn Wildermuth, who wrote the excellent book Pragmatic ADO.NET (Addison-Wesley, 2003, 357 pp, $44.99, ISBN 0-201-74568-2), has been working closely with the Silverlight team at Microsoft. Just in time for the release of Silverlight at MIX07, O'Reilly has released Shawn's "short cut" on Silverlight electronically on the Web. Getting Started with Silverlight (O'Reilly, 2007, 62 pp, $9.99, ISBN 0-596-51068-3) "in

Getting Started with Silverlight (O’Reilly, 2007, 62 pp, $9.99, ISBN 0-596-51068-3) “introduces you to Silverlight’s key features and shows you how to tap into its functionality to spice up your HTML and ASP.NET pages.” The book is written to the February Silverlight CTP, which was a preview of Silverlight 1.0, so it covers programming Silverlight with JavaScript, but not programming Silverlight with managed code or using extensible controls.

I’m a fan of Shawn’s technical writing, and Getting Started with Silverlight confirms my high opinion. Shawn has a good feeling for what you need to know, and how to present it clearly.

Here’s the table of contents:

Why Silverlight? ………………………. 2

What Is Silverlight? …………………… 3

Working with Silverlight XAML……….. 7

Comparing Silverlight and WPF……… 17

Development Model ………………… 19

Using Silverlight with ASP.NET …….. 42

Using Tools ………………………….. 54

Finding Examples in the World …….. 61

Summary …………………………….. 61

For Further Reading ………………… 62

Here’s a very short excerpt:

Finding Examples in the World

Beyond the resources that are available from the Silverlight DevCenter (https://msdn.microsoft.com/silverlight), there are a number of very good examples of Silverlight working on the Web today. They include:

• Dr. Greenthumb (a Silverlight Game): https://labs.blitzagency.com/?p=50 (https://tinysells.com/82)

• Silverlight Scratchpad: https://notstatic.com/archives/65 (https://tinysells.com/83)

• Silverlight Egg Timer: https://blogs.interfacett.com/simon/2006/12/11/wpfe-egg-timer.html (https://tinysells.com/84)

Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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