Shawn Wildermuth, who wrote the excellent book Pragmatic ADO.NET (Addison-Wesley, 2003, 357 pp, $44.99, ISBN 0-201-74568-2), has been working closely with the Silverlight team at Microsoft. Just in time for the release of Silverlight at MIX07, O'Reilly has released Shawn's "short cut" on Silverlight electronically on the Web.
Getting Started with Silverlight (O'Reilly, 2007, 62 pp, $9.99, ISBN 0-596-51068-3) "introduces you to Silverlight's key features and shows you how to tap into its functionality to spice up your HTML and ASP.NET pages." The book is written to the February Silverlight CTP, which was a preview of Silverlight 1.0, so it covers programming Silverlight with JavaScript, but not programming Silverlight with managed code or using extensible controls.
I'm a fan of Shawn's technical writing, and Getting Started with Silverlight confirms my high opinion. Shawn has a good feeling for what you need to know, and how to present it clearly.
Here's the table of contents:
Why Silverlight? ............................ 2
What Is Silverlight? ........................ 3
Working with Silverlight XAML........... 7
Comparing Silverlight and WPF......... 17
Development Model ..................... 19
Using Silverlight with ASP.NET ........ 42
Using Tools ................................ 54
Finding Examples in the World ........ 61
Summary ................................... 61
For Further Reading ..................... 62
Here's a very short excerpt:
Beyond the resources that are available from the Silverlight DevCenter (http://msdn.microsoft.com/silverlight), there are a number of very good examples of Silverlight working on the Web today. They include:
• Dr. Greenthumb (a Silverlight Game): http://labs.blitzagency.com/?p=50 (http://tinysells.com/82)
• Silverlight Scratchpad: http://notstatic.com/archives/65 (http://tinysells.com/83)
• Silverlight Egg Timer: http://blogs.interfacett.com/simon/2006/12/11/wpfe-egg-timer.html (http://tinysells.com/84)
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