Getting Started With Silverlight
[This page was last updated Feb. 3, 2009 and will be updated frequently]
Silverlight.net offers a wide variety of learning tools, including videos, tutorials, Quick Starts, Blog entries and much more. You can also download everything you need to begin creating Silverlight applications, and review showcase applications for inspiration.
This document is an unofficial guide to getting started; its goal it to walk you through what I personally suggest as the initial steps for setting up your Silverlight development environment and for beginning your exploration of this rich development framework.
What You Need Before You Start
Before you begin, you’ll want to have installed one of the following
Getting Started
| For everything that follows the one web address you need is http://silverlight.net – from there you can find everything else. |
To get the Silverlight software, click on the Get Started menu choice,
On the GetStarted page, the essential downloads and installations are numbers 1 and 4,
Learning Silverlight
Once you’ve installed the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1, you can make your life much easier by reviewing some of the introductory material readily available.
One approach is just to step through the six steps as listed on the Get Started page,
An Alternative Path
On the other hand, here is my more idiosyncratic path through the material…
Start by watching Tim’s Getting Started Video
Next, Read this tutorial on interface controls.
Watch these “How Do I” videos on Blend for Programmers: Part 1 Part2 Part3 and/or read this tutorial
Data
Next, it’s time to focus on this video on data and then this tutorial on creating n-tier applications 
and data binding.
Follow that with a great video on Cross Domain issues and then read up on user controls which you can supplement with this video on keyboard input followed by this video on user controls.
Styles and Templates
You may then want to read my tutorial and watch my videos on Styles and Templates and you may want to go on to the videos on custom controls, which build on your knowledge of templates.
Freestyle
After all that you can pretty much move freely among the other tutorials and videos on such topics as HyperVideo and Multi-page applications.
Enjoy, and remember to post questions in the Forums and if you need help, give me a holler!
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