While studying for another certification, I'm also messing with a not so new technology called Silverlight. Currently, the latest stable version is 2. The Silverlight tools for Visual Studio 2008 can be a little bit of a hassle to install if you happen to test out and install the earlier beta version. Since I'm working on a newly reformatted OS, there's no reason why my install could possibly fail. I'm not going to talk about my previous installation issues and I will save that for another blog entry. On my personal computer, I have a Web Developer 2008 express installed, Microsoft Expression suite installed and the Silverlight 2 tools to go along with it. All I'm missing now is the SDK to go through the various samples.
While messing with the Visual Studio 2008 aspect of working with XAML, I quickly realized that it offers almost the same features that you would expect out of .NET applications. There are slight differences on how you would interact with each controls because they're Silverlight applications specific. The main principle stays the same regardless if you use VB or C# (as far as programming). I built my first simple application easily by passing a calendar selected date into a textbox. This was even before I started learning about the technology just to show how easy it was. After going through some tutorials, I also realized that hard-coding XAML in Visual Studio 2008 is highly inefficient especially if styling the UI is your main objective.
Expression Blend is there to do the heavy lifting of styling while Visual Studio provides the back-end programming support and capabilities. Although you can do everything in VS, the tools built in Expression Blend does everything for you. When you're finally done with the design aspect of the application, then you can safely move back to Visual Studio to take care of the programming work. The best part about both tools is that they're tightly integrated and use the same work folder/solution structure. The ability to switch back and forth streamlines the process of building an application. The XAML files (where all objects/code-behinds are defined) when compiled are compressed into a single XAP file which contains the necessary XAML and resources used in the application. When a browser requests the Silverlight page, the XAP is then downloaded in a client's PC and runs. Since everything runs off a client's PC, the application runs very smooth and the only server interactions done thereafter is when data are passed back and forth.
While Silverlight is still considered to be in its early stages, I see a lot of great possibilities in the future. It will be one of the hottest web/desktop application out there. Although Flash is great, Silverlight helps .NET programmers leverage their skill set and accomplish the same things that Flash does.and probably more. I'm really excited for this technology because I can apply some type of creativity versus the old way of doing ASP.NET which is strictly HTML and CSS based. After I'm done with the certifications and passing the GMAT, I'm going to invest most of my learning efforts in this technology. I'll be constantly be reading about it here and there for now just to make sure that I'm on top of its latest changes. I might even pick up a book, who knows.
- Dennis