Professional Silverlight 2 for ASP.NET Developers (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)

Our overarching goal in writing this book was to give ASP.NET developers the power to quickly and easily create visually stunning Internet applications, coupled with rich interactivity to fully immerse the user in a new online experience. Silverlight gives you everything you need to do just this, and in serious style!

As well as taking you through each feature that ships with Silverlight, this book will make sure you're able to debug, troubleshoot, and performance-tune your Silverlight applications, as well as seamlessly hook into your existing ASP.NET architecture and code base.

This book is aimed at .NET developers and architects who want to quickly get up to speed with all that Silverlight 2 has to offer.

As well as covering the breadth of features that Silverlight 2 provides, this book makes a point of demonstrating where necessary how the particular feature can be integrated tightly with the ASP.NET host application. An example is in Chapter 7, where the ASP.NET Profile service is utilized directly from within Silverlight to obtain user-specific data.

It's fair to say that although this book is aimed at ASP.NET developers, it covers all of the salient features of Silverlight 2 to the degree that it's a useful programming resource for developers not using ASP.NET also.

If you're fresh to .NET development, however, you might want to check out a beginning .NET book first, to help you overcome the syntax and set-up queries when learning a new language. Otherwise, take a deep breath and dive in!

This book covers the full feature set of Silverlight 2, diving into each of the subject areas to give depth and breadth coverage. As well as teaching you about the component parts of the Silverlight API, the book also covers debugging, troubleshooting, and performance-tuning your Silverlight applications, arming you with all the skills and knowledge you'll need to create advanced Silverlight-based applications in record time.

Importantly, this book covers the integration points between ASP.NET and Silverlight, taking you through the different techniques you can use to seamlessly augment your existing or new ASP.NET web sites with the power of Silverlight.

If you want to program in Silverlight and potentially use ASP.NET as the host, then this book covers it all.

The book is split into two distinct parts. Part I is titled "Silverlight Fundamentals for ASP.NET Developers," and Part II is titled "Developing ASP.NET Applications with Silverlight." Part I is intended to give you grounding in what Silverlight is as a technology and how it fits into the Web-based landscape. The component pieces of a Silverlight application are also laid out at a high level, and any knowledge required before putting an application together is explained.

Part II is written to give you depth of knowledge across the Silverlight feature-set and show you how to leverage the power of both Silverlight and ASP.NET to create compelling applications.

A brief synopsis of the content follows:

To get the most out of this book, it's recommended that you code along with the examples provided, either by copying the code shown in the chapters or by downloading the samples and running them yourself.

To do this, you're going to need Visual Studio 2008, which is available to download from MSDN, provided you have a subscription. As well as this, you'll also need to download and install the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008, which allows you to create Silverlight-based applications within Visual Studio. This install will also take care of installing the Silverlight run time and SDK for you. You can download this installer from www.silverlight.net/getstarted.

If you want to follow the examples that use Microsoft Expression Blend or the Deep Zoom Composer, you can also download these from www.silverlight.net/getstarted.

As well as these software requirements, you will need a basic working development knowledge of Microsoft .NET and have experience in Web-based development. A passion for creating rich web applications is advantageous, although not necessary!