The best way to learn Silverlight 2 is to visit the www.silverlight.net
web-site. You can find free online tutorials, videos and training
available there. The site also hosts an online forum system where MVPs
and Microsoft Silverlight team members will be able to help answer technical
questions. Also make sure to subscribe to the Silverlight
Community RSS Feed, Jesse
Liberty's Blog, and Tim Heuer's Blog for a daily dose of great Silverlight
content.
I've recently updated my Digg-client tutorial for the final
Silverlight 2 release. This provides an end to end walkthrough of a
Silverlight 2 application, and helps explain the different programming concepts
behind it (controls, layout management, networking, data-binding, styles, user
controls, control templates, etc). If you are brand new to Silverlight or
WPF development I recommend walking through it to understand the basics:
Part 0: Introduction
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
You can develop Silverlight 2 applications using any version
of Visual Studio 2008. Simply install the Silverlight Tools for Visual
Studio 2008 download to get Silverlight tooling support within it.
If you do not have VS 2008, you can alternatively install
the free Visual
Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 Edition. This free tool provides great
ASP.NET development tool support, and starting today also now supports Silverlight 2 development. You can follow all of the steps in my tutorial above
using the Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition - and get full
intellisense, debugging, and deployment support.