Wednesday, June 10, 2009

OVERVIEW OF SILVERLIGHT


MICROSOFT SILVERLIGHT

  • Silverlight was formerly known as Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere.

  • It is a fast and a strong competitor to Adobe Flash.

  • It is a cross-browser, cross platform plug-in, a light-weight subset of XAML, which supports Ajax, Python, Ruby, etc., and helps develop Rich Internet Applications (RIA) , and enables a rich .NET development platform that runs in the browser.

Features:
Cross-platform:
Developers can write Silverlight applications using any .NET language (including VB, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby).

Cross-browser: It runs on all major browsers(IE, FireFox, Safari, etc).

  • Silverlight 2 does not require the .NET Framework to be installed on a computer in order to run.
  • Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Studio tool support that enables great developer / designer workflow and integration when building Silverlight applications.
  • Silverlight enables the display of high-definition video files.
  • Silverlight framework allows the developer to create impressive animation effects in less time.

Some of the important features:

WPF UI Framework: Silverlight 2 includes a rich WPF-based UI framework that makes building rich Web applications much easier. It includes a powerful graphics and animation engine, as well as rich support for higher-level UI capabilities like controls, layout management, data-binding, styles, and template skinning.

Rich Controls: Silverlight 2 includes a rich set of built-in controls that developers and designers can use to quickly build applications.

Rich Networking Support: Silverlight 2 includes rich networking support. It includes out of the box support for calling REST, WS*/SOAP, POX, RSS, and standard HTTP services.

Rich Base Class Library: Silverlight 2 includes a rich .NET base class library of functionality (collections, IO, generics, threading, globalization, XML, local storage, etc).

Monday, June 8, 2009

GRID

The Grid control is the most flexible layout panel and supports arranging controls in multi row and multi column layouts.
It is similar to HTML table.
You can use the Grid layout to create fixed or relative sized cells and you can place controls within a cell or have them span a cell.

CANVAS

  • Simplest and basic layout.
  • It provides the simple ability to absolutely position child elements.
  • It is used as a container for other Silverlight controls.

Canvas control has three properties:

  • The Left property represents the distance between the left side of a control and its parent container canvas.
  • The top property represents the distance between top of a control and its parent container canvas.
  • The Z-Index property represents the z-order of a control. that is it determines whether the control is in front of or behind another overlapping control.

RULES OF ANIMATION

1.You can set the initial state, final state and duration of the animation.Silverlight calculates the frame rate.
2.That means a Silverlight animation can do only one thing. Modify the values of a property over an interval of time.
3.For eg., the button , Width property uses the double data type. To animate in, you use the Double Animation class .If you want to modify the color that's used to paint the background of your canvas,you need to use the ColorAnimation class.

ANIMATION

  • Animation allows you to create truly dynamic user interface.
  • Animation are a core part of the Silverlight model that means you dont need to use timers and events handling code to put them into action.
  • Silverlight animations is a scaled down version of the Windows Presentation Foundation animation system.

SILVERLIGHT.JS LIBRARY

  • Silverlight.js library is a set of Javascript functions that provide interaction between unmanaged Javascript, the Silverlight plug in and Silverlight application.
  • It is a helper file which enables web sites to create advanced Silverlight installation and installation experiences.
  • It exposes function that helps to implement Silverlight application in web pages using Javascript.
  • This library allows to create a Silverlight object in the DOM, Load Silverlight applications into the object, and then handle load events.

SAMPLE CODE RESOUECE

RESOURCE

Resources can be used to:
  • Create non-visual objects.
  • Resuse objects.
  • Centralize details.

RESOURCE DICTIONARY

  • A resource dictionary can store any object.
  • You can loop through all the items.
  • Each item stored must have a unique key.
  • You can access the items using the Key or using their Index.

Sunday, June 7, 2009

LIFE CYCLE OF SILVERLIGHT

  • The user request the HTML entry page in the browser.
  • The Silverlight plug in is loaded.It downloads the XAP file with your application.
  • The Silverlight plug in reads the AppManifest.xml file from the XAP to find out what assemblies your application uses.It creates the Silverlight runtime environment and then loads your application assembly into it.
  • The Silverlight plug in creates an instance of your custom application class.
  • The default constructor of the application class raises the Startup event.
  • Your application handles the startup event and creates the Startup page.

ABOUT PANELS IN ENCODER

There are four main panels:
1.Panel-Display the video being encoded.
2.Timeline Panel-Displays the video's Timeline and various controls.
3.Media Conent Panel-Display the control you imported in the application as well as the logs.
4.Encode/Enhance/Metadata/Output panel-You can set up the way the video will be encoded.

EXPRESSION ENCODER

  • Expression encoder encodes and publishes video.
  • To encode video files,It is not a video editor though it has some video editing capabilities.
  • It is not a Silverlight application editor,though it can produce a Silverlight content.