Greg Does IT

On yesterday’s Scot Alt.NET meeting I held a presentation (An Introduction to Silverlight) that was aimed at providing an overview of Silverlight and looking at some of it’s most important features. Thanks to the about 30 people who’ve attended and given feedback, I hope you’ve found it useful. For those who have missed out I’ll be writing up some follow up blog posts on the same topic.

Slides & code

The slides and code of the talk are available for download:

• On SlideShare
• An Introduction To Silverlight – presentation, PowerPoint format
• An Introduction To Silverlight – presentation, OpenOffice Impress format
• XAML example source code
• VideoBrush example source code (large file as it contains the sample video as well!)
• Styling and templating example source code
• Dependency Properties example source code
• Attached Properties example source code (this one I didn’t show in the presentation)
• MVVM example source code

Cool Silverlight applications

Some interesting links worth looking at (the ones I couldn’t show at the end of the presentation):

• A great DeepZoom example: Michael Jordan mosaic
• Silverlight client for Facebook (needs Silverlight 4)
• The cocktail page in Flash and the version I’ve developed rapidly in in Silverlight
• Other good Silverlight examples

Brief summary of the talk

The structure of the talk was the following:

• What is Silverlight?
  A short and simple explanation: RIA concepts, relation to WPF, competitors
• Flash vs Silverlight
  An overview focusing on the differences of the technologies and their features.
• Silverlight (and WPF) features
  Features that make Silverlight and WPF different than their predecessor technologies (e.g. WinForms and WebForms). Overview of how Silverlight is more limited than WPF
• XAML
  What is it, why it’s good and how it works. Overview and demo.
• UI Basics
  Silverlight introduces a new way of handling the UI. Brief overview of how this is done and demo of the VideoBrush
• Styling and templating
  Silverlight is very powerful in customizing user interface through styling and templating. Demo of styling a button and then completely changing the looks of this button with templating
• Dependency Properties
  One of the most significant features Silverlight (and WPF) introduce are Dependency Properties. Overview of how these properties add functionality compared to CLR properties by providing property changed notification, data binding, animation, DefaultValue and ClearValue. Demo of how Dependency Properties can be used
• Attached Properties
  (On the presentation I skipped this part) Brief overview of attached properties, demo.
• MVVM
  Overview of the Model View ViewModel concept and why it is useful. Demo of a simple application designed with MVVM.
• Effort To Learn Silverlight
  My thoughts of how much effort it takes to learn certain parts of Silverlight if coming from a .NET background
• Why It’s Worth It
  Some inspiration on why it’s worth jumping into Silverlight development.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 5th, 2010 at 7:33 am and is filed under Silverlight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.