Silverlight and the NET Framework Session 1 from Mix 07
How Silverlight and .NET framework will be a two and a half hour session, so this will be part 1. They will be covering how this works. Right now he is talking about the characteristics of a RIA application. He is talking about Outlook Web Access and how that is a decent RIA application, but the best we can do now.
Silverlight is a development environment that integrates AJAX, VB & C# and even LINQ, works in Visual Studio and Expression. Of course it is cross-platform and cross-browser. The Silverlight framework is about 4MB versus the 50MB for the full framework. They took out things like COM interop (good) and other non-nessecary components of the framework. There is not a complete binary compatible object.
Silverlight runs in a Sandbox because of real-world limitations to running in a browser. Includes safe isolated storage capabilities, so your application can store information. File uploads can be manipulated in the browser, which you can not do with JavaScript. Some domain networking support too.
A Silverlight application will have at least an HTML page, standard JavaScript files (provided in the SDK), YourApp.xaml and YourApp.dll. You can include other libraries, including 3rd parties and resource files. Right now all files are loose, but zip packaging will come in the future.
You can debug into a Silverlight object running in the browser. Yesterday Scott Guthrie showed how to debug it remotely on the MAC too. I honestly had never used the Imediate window to change the values of objects, very cool.
The references in a Silverlight project are the Silverlight libraries, not the regular libraries. I wonder if I could include those libraries in my applications, say on my web server?
Anyway, we are getting to some code so I better pay attention. I wish I could have done this in class in college.