Silverlight Tools

With Silverlight being so popular, there are already many editors and design tools being planned by vendors. The two most common Silverlight design and development tools are:

Visual Studio 2008 :

Visual Studio is Microsoft's premiere integrate software development environment. Visual Studio now hosts management utilities as well as development tools. The figure below shows Visual Studio 2008.

At this time, Visual Studio 2008 offers the ability to build Silverlight applications by using XAML but does not offer a visual designer.

Expression Blend 2 :

Microsoft has introduced a whole new line of cutting edge tools for use by designers, Microsoft Expression Suite. Microsoft Expression Suite includes a tool, Microsoft Expression Blend, that is a Silverlight development tool targeting designers. In a brilliant move, Microsoft designed the Expression suite of tools to integrate nicely with Visual Studio. This comes close to completing the cycle of tools needed to work with the .NET Framework technologies and architectures. ASP.NET, for instance, was redesigned with code behind files containing compilable code so that developers could work on programming language code and components while designers could work on the markup and user interface.

Lunar Eclipse :

In the first module, we mentioned that just as there is a version of the .NET Framework that runs locally on the Linux operating system, the Mono Project, there is a version of the Silverlight plugin that also runs locally on the Linux operating system, Moonlight. Lunar Eclipse is a new design tool created by open source developers that was created to run locally on Linux and design Moonlight applications.

Versions of Silverlight :

Version 1.0 was released to market in September 2007. Silverlight version 1.0 includes the ability to:

• Create and manage 2D graphics and animation.
• Handle mouse, keyboard, and ink input.
• Deliver WMV, WMA, and MP3 media.
• Work with JPEG and PNG imaging.
• Format and manipulate text.
• Communicate with services and download server resources by using the HTTP downloader.
• Parse Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) content and markup.
• Navigate Web content by utilizing the JavaScript Document Object Model (DOM).

Version 2.0 was released to market in March 2008. Silverlight version 2.0 will include:

• All of the functionality included in Silverlight version 1.0 .
• Support for managed code C#, VB, Python, Ruby.
• XAML extensibility.
• Control class and sample controls.