Silverlight 2.0: Beyond the Basics
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Jesse Liberty, the "Silverlight Geek", wants to help you dive deeper into Silverlight 2.0. Tackling practices like working with multi-page applications and clever ways to handle Silverlight payload, Jesse helps take you beyond the intro.
Want to Learn Silverlight 2.0?
Joe Stagner has an amazing post with links to over 40 Silverlight how-to videos from from Mike Taulty. Check it out!
Programming Silverlight 2.0
Jesse is working on a book with Tim Heuer called Programming Silverlight 2.0. The book covers the release version of Silverlight 2.0 and aims to be a pragmatic how-to rather than re-doing Microsoft documentation.
Multi-page Silverlight applications
Ashish Shetty asserts that pages should be thought of as user controls. Set aside a page as your "master" page which will load subsequent pages as its content. You can also use this approach to help your Silverlight pages maintain state. Just as you store session and context information on a web server, the "master" Silverlight page can hold objects for reference among different Silverlight pages.
Jesse is further working on concepts for building an ASP.NET Master-page metaphor into Silverlight.
Smart XAP File Use
The XAP file is used as a way to package and compress contents of a Silverlight application. Developers who are careful about how they design their applications can use a XAP file to deliver only what the client needs to initially run the application. The rest of the applications resources can then load-on-demand.
Some developers are experimenting with the practice of using isolated storage to persists the shell of an application so subsequent visits to the site would only require the transmission of dynamic content. Clever!