To help people come up to speed with Silverlight 2, I wrote
a Silverlight application and put together a series of step by step tutorials
that drill into and explain the different programming concepts behind it
(controls, layout management, networking, data-binding, styles, user controls,
templates, etc). I also added a tutorial post that demonstrates how to migrate
the application outside of the browser and make it a desktop application using
WPF and the full .NET Framework.
Below are the pointers to the 8 tutorials I've put together:
Part 1: Creating "Hello World" with Silverlight 2 and
VS 2008
Part 2: Using Layout Management
Part 3: Using Networking to Retrieve Data and Populate a
DataGrid
Part 4: Using Style Elements to Better Encapsulate Look and
Feel
Part 5: Using the ListBox and DataBinding to Display List Data
Part 6: Using User Controls to Implement Master/Details
Scenarios
Part 7: Using Templates to Customize Control Look and Feel
Part 8: Creating a Digg Desktop Version of our Application
using WPF
The application I've built the tutorials around is a simple
search front end to the popular Digg.com
site, and allows users to type in search topics and browse Digg stories that
match them.
All of the UI in the application is built using
Silverlight's WPF framework. The application uses the Silverlight
networking stack and cross-domain access support to query the Digg REST API directly, and
uses LINQ and LINQ to XML to query/transform the returned data into DiggStory
objects that I databind the UI against:
Figure 1
The application supports a master/details data interaction
model that allows users to select stories from the search list and quickly
drill into more details about them. A user can jump to the Digg article
directly from the details form, or close it and pick another story to drill
into:
Figure 2
The entire application is implemented in about
35 lines of C# code and 75 lines of XAML page/user-control markup. It
only uses controls and libraries built-into Silverlight.
If you have used WPF before the UI concepts I
discuss in the tutorial series will all be very familiar. If you haven't
used WPF before, the tutorials should provide a good overview of the
fundamental programming concepts in it, and hopefully provide you with the
basic knowledge necessary to start building Silverlight 2 applications with VS
2008 when Beta1 comes out.
I'll post details on my blog once Beta1 is
available for download. I'll also upload the final Digg application to my
site (along with the code + project file to open and edit it in VS 2008) once
Beta1 has shipped.
Hope this helps,
Scott
