Designing for Silverlight
Silverlight gives you the capabilities you need to light up the Web. You can deliver
compelling, exciting, discoverable experiences, with all the features you and your
clients expect, like scalable graphics, animated content, customized styling and
skinning, and to really push the boundaries to deliver new experiences that the
browser simply couldn’t deliver before.
With Silverlight you can work seamlessly with developers to connect your applications
to your customers systems using web services; or make use of more advanced technologies
such as ADO.NET to directly query and page data from your server; or use Isolated
Storage to work with data locally.
To get start designing for Silverlight there a couple of key tools that you will
need to install: Expression Design, Expression Blend and Visual Studio.
Which tool you use the most will depend on your individual background. Expression
Design will feel familiar to you if you are from a graphic arts background. You’ll
find Expression Blend a great place to start if you have experience with interactive
design, animation, prototyping, and user interface design while Visual Studio will
appeal if you enjoy coding as well as design when building an application.
The content included in the links below will introduce you to some of the core aspects
of building your first Silverlight application.
These different lessons will be concentrating on using Expression Blend with support
from Visual Studio to build your Silverlight content.
