Getting Started with Silverlight 2

I have been working with Microsoft tools most of my career with Chicago Technologies, from VB4 to VB6 to Classic ASP to ASP.NET, but I just recently started working with Silverlight 2. So far I love it. Specifically:

1. I love XAML ‒ it is the markup language I always wanted.

• It is relatively easy to arrange controls on a page.
  
  
• When I layout controls in XAML, things work like I expect without worrying about what browser (or version of the browser) I‘m running in.
  
  
• I‘m tired of working with HTML and CSS and spending more time trying to get layouts right than developing my application.
  
  

2. Silverlight is easy to work with.

• Install Tools for Visual Studio 2008


• Silverlight client can maintain state. Wow is this nice for us developers!. And no more post‒backs ‒ wow this is nice for users!
  


• Silverlight is .NET, so a lot of the good things I‘ve learned with ASP.NET still apply and it integrates very nicely with WCF.
  

I‘m on my first Silverlight project, so I do not claim to be an expert, (yet), but I love what I‘ve done so far and I‘m planning on being an expert by the time this project goes to production. In the meantime, here are a couple links I found extremely helpful in getting me going:

Scott Gu‘s End to End Tutorial
By Scott Gu

This is a great place to start learning Silverlight. Scott does a great job explaining practical uses for Silverlight and you will feel confident enough in your understanding after completing this tutorial to start programming in Silverlight.


Navigating and passing values between XAML Pages in Silverlight 2
By Nipun Tomar‘s

This article shows a nice technique for navigating between .xaml pages. I found this to be helpful when I started building a real application with more than one page.