Silverlight Tips, Tricks, Tutorials and Links Page

I'll be using this page to link to Silverlight 2 articles and posts (both ones I write as well ones by others).  Check back often for updates as I'm just getting started.

Getting Started Tutorials

• Silverlight 2 End to End Tutorial: Digg Sample: I recommend reading this post first if you are looking to get started with Silverlight 2 development for the first time.  It not only describes the high-level of what Silverlight 2 provides, but also links to a series of 8 blog posts that walkthrough building a Digg client sample application.  These tutorial posts provide a good introduction to Silverlight 2 and WPF development concepts. 

• First Look at Using Expression Blend with Silverlight 2: I recommend downloading the Expression Blend 2.5 March preview and following along with this tutorial post.  I think it does a good job of showing off some of the common features of Expression Blend, and uses it to build an IM chat client sample.

• Jesse Liberty Silverlight Tutorials: Jesse Liberty is writing an in-depth series of articles that cover Silverlight programming concepts in more depth.  Bookmark this page and check back frequently to read them as they get published (he also has PDF versions of each article that you can download and read offline).

• Installation Tips for Silverlight Tools Beta1 for VS 2008: Bradley Bartz has a good post that links to the tools to install for Silverlight, as well as what todo if there are problems getting it installed.

Getting Started Presentations

• Building Rich Internet Applications with Silverlight (Part 1 and 2): Joe Stegman and Mike Harsh presented this two part talk at MIX 08 on how to build applications with Silverlight.  You can use the link above to both watch the video of their talk as well as download the slides + demos.

• Creating Rich, Dynamic User Interfaces with Silverlight 2 Controls: Karen Corby has an awesome talk from MIX 08 that does a great job explaining styles, control templates, user controls and more.  You can run and download her completed FlickR application here.

• My Getting Started with Silverlight Talk: You can download the slides + samples from my "Getting Started with Silverlight 2" talk that I recently gave in Arizona.  Feel free to re-use the slides however you want for your own presentations.

Documentation Links

• Silverlight 2 QuickStart Tutorials: These sample tutorials are very useful to help with coming up to speed on Silverlight.

• Silverlight 2 Developer Poster: Download and print-out your own version of the Silverlight 2 developer poster.

• Silverlight Control Source and Unit Tests: Shawn Burke links to the source code for the built-in Silverlight controls, as well as the unit tests for them.

• MSDN Silverlight 2 Beta1 Online Documentation: This page links to the official Silverlight 2 documentation.  You can download an offline version here.

Tutorials and Samples

• "How Do I?" with Silverlight: This link points to a page that will contain a bunch of video tutorials on Silverlight 2.

• Hard Rock Memorabilia Sample: Scott Stanfield from Vertigo Software talks about the cool Hard Rock Memorabilia site they launched in March using Silverlight 2.

• Using Deep Zoom with Silverlight 2: Jacek Ciereszko has a nice blog post that describes how to use the "Deep Zoom" feature of Silverlight 2 to implement image zoom functionality like with the Hard Rock sample.

• Game Programming with Silverlight: Mike Snow is building a 11-part blog series that discusses how to build an online game using Silverlight.

• Homepage "Link Cloud" application: Jeff Wilcox talks about a cool tag cloud application he has built.

Deployment

• Providing a Great Silverlight Deployment Experience: Tim Heuer has a nice post that talks about techniques you can use to optimize the Silverlight installation experience for users who don't already have it installed.

• Using Silverlight 2 on a Production Web Server: Brad Abrams has a useful post that talks about a few things to check if you are copying a Silverlight .xap file up to an IIS web-server.

User Controls

• Creating and Using Silverlight User Controls: This blog post of mine talks about how to easily create user controls as well as perform view/model databinding with them.

ListBox and ScrollViewer

• Ultimate ListBox and ScrollViewer Frequently Asked Questions Guide: David Anson (who wrote the Silverlight ListBox and ScrollViewer controls) has put together an awesome FAQ all about these controls and the scenarios you can do with them.

• Cool (wacky) uses of the ListBox and ScrollViewer controls: David Anson has another great post that shows off the flexibility of data and control templates.

DataGrid

• Using the Silverlight DataGrid and Defining Columns for a Silverlight DataGrid: Scott Morrison has started a great series of posts that describe how to use the new Silverlight 2 DataGrid control (which he is the program manager for - so he definitely knows his stuff!).

• Using Silverlight 2's DataGrid with WCF + LINQ to SQL: This 15 minute video blog demonstrates how to build a LINQ to SQL object model on the server and publish it using WCF.  It then demonstrates how to build a Silverlight client that uses the new Silverlight DataGrid control, and which calls the WCF service to retrieve the LINQ to SQL data to populate it with.

• Simple Editing of Web Service Data in a DataGrid: Mike Taulty has a nice blog post that shows how to create a WCF service on the server, and then use it from a Silverlight 2 client to retrieve data, bind it to a DataGrid, allow users to update rows, add/delete rows, and then save it back to the server using Silverlight 2 Beta1.

• Sorting with Silverlight 2's DataGrid Control: The DataGrid control in Silverlight 2 Beta1 doesn't yet have built-in column sorting support (it is coming in Beta2).  That hasn't stopped Matt Berseth though!  In this post he shows how to implement sorting using a custom header column approach.  Also check out Matt's post here, which provides a DataGrid test page that shows off a number of the current DataGrid features.

Control Templates

• Creating a Custom Skin for Silverlight's Button Control: Matt Berseth has a great post that talks about the skinning and styling capability of Silverlight controls.

• Writing a Templated Silverlight Control: Shawn Burke has an awesome post that details how to create a custom templated Silverlight control.

• Improving Access to Silverlight's Generic.xaml Resources (and read Part 2 here): David Anson has a great utility that demonstrates how to look up and extract the default XAML styling for the built-in Silverlight controls.

Web Services and Networking

• Web Services and Silverlight: This helpful post discusses how to use web-services with Silverlight and links to relevant quickstart samples and documentation.

• Calling Web Services with Silverlight 2 (Part 1) and (Part 2): Tim Heuer has a nice set of posts that discuss calling web-services using Silverlight.

HTML Integration

• Silverlight Interop with HTML: Wilco Bauwer has a great post on the HTML and JavaScript integration features enabled by Silverlight 2 (he should know all about them - since he was the developer who built them!).

Unit Testing

• Unit Testing with Silverlight 2: This post of mine talks about how to unit-test Silverlight 2 applications using the unit test framework in the Silverlight SDK.

Video Scenarios

• Encoding Video for Microsoft Silverlight Delivery: Ben Waggoner's talk at MIX 08 discusses best practices on how to encode video for Silverlight.

Accessibility and 508 Compliance

• Accessibility in Silverlight 2: Mark Rideout from the Silverlight team talks about accessibility support with Silverlight 2, and talks about how you'll be able to build section 508 and accessible solutions using Silverlight.

Hope this helps,

Scott