Intro to SharePoint: Silverlight

I have been watching a series of webcasts created by Microsoft MVPs that introduce various features of SharePoint to .NET developers.  The entire series can be found here.  These are my notes from the third webcast, on SharePoint and Silverlight.

PRESENTER:
Andrew Connell
MVP Office SP Server
www.andrewconnell.com/blog

SILVERLIGHT OVERVIEW

Silverlight develops a rich user experience with zero postback

Some types of data Silverlight can provide:

• images, sounds, videos, rss
• custom web service
• existing intranet services
• public internet mashup APIs

HISTORY OF SILVERLIGHT

Silverlight 1.0:

• Silverlight 1.0 is the current production release (RTW) and was shipped in Q3 2007
• It defines the render(design) part using XAML
• Uses a WPF-based interface
• A Silverlight application lives inside of a webpage
• The webpage will include some custom JavaScript (AJAX) to talk to the Silverlight app and to the various web services.  I.E., the code-behind is 100% JavaScript-driven

Silverlight 2.0:

• Today: Silverlight 2.0 is in beta.  It doesn’t need JavaScript to talk to Silverlight
• The Silverlight plugin deploys a tiny version into the .NET Framework, and now I can write C# or VB code and then complie the code into an asembly, and now the assembly will be part of the Silverlight file (control) and the assembly will be running on the client machine.  I.E., the code-behind uses managed code
• Some of Silverlight 2.0 runtime features include 2-D, graphics, audio, video, animations, text, controls, layout, styles/templates, data binding, networking, .NET Support, LIN1, XML API’s, generics, HTML integrtions, local storage, Crypto APIs, and threading

Silverlight 2.0 SDK libraries include:

• Full support for dynamic languages
• Addition controls like sliders, grid controls
• LINQ for XML
• XML Serialization
• RSS feeds

SHAREPOINT AND SILVERLIGHT

Environment needed:

• WSS 3.0 SP1
• Config of IIS Web app

Server config needed:

• .NET Framework 3.5 if using Silverlight 2.0, or .NET 2.0 for Silverlight 1.0
• Deploy System.Web.Silverlight.dll in GAC
• Extend web.config if ISS web app with ASP.NET extensions and SL 2.0 config elements
• MIME type registration of the .XAP file extension for IIS web app (format: application/x-silverlight-2-b1

Dev environment needed:

• Visual Studio 2008 extended with tools for Silverlight 2.0
• Microsoft Expression Blend
• Silverlight 2.0 SDK (which would be included in VS 2008 tools)

Client prerequisites: Silverlight 2.0 plug-in must be installed

Scenarios for using Silverlight:

• Complex and dynamic interaction with dashboard data (visually impressive reports, etc)
• Visualize multimedia data stored in SP
• Rich navigation controls
• Interactive field types, Web parts, and pages
• Off-load more work to the clients (browsers)

SILVERLIGHT 2.0 AND SHAREPOINT

Host containers that can be used to trigger a Silverlight control:

• Web Parts
• App pages and site pages
• Custom field types
• Navigation control

Data can be passed in both directions:

• InitParameters – passes data into Silverlight (like if you were calling a method)
• Hidden Fields or XML Data Islands
• Web Services
• WPF

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