Introduction to Silverlight 2 Training Course

This course teaches the fundamentals of Silverlight 2. It is designed to be used both for classroom instruction and for self-study. The course is comprised of 4 lessons, 230 PowerPoint slides, and 18 .NET projects and works on XP or Vista. The slides come with extensive notes that allow them to be read almost like a book. Six of the .NET projects are demos and the rest are exercises whose purpose is to force the student to actively participate. The following is the course outline: Lesson 1: “Silverlight Overview”. This describes the architecture and philosophy of Silverlight, how to create simple controls and how to populate them using web services. In this basic lesson, no XAML is presented because it would obscure the essence of Silverlight (XAML is merely a tool for creating Silverlight objects.) Lesson 2: “Web Technologies and Trends”. Here we list current web technolgies, their strengths and weakness, comparison of Silverlight verus WPF and when to use each, long-term trends, and new business paradigms enabled by Silverlight and Azure. Lesson 3: “Logical Tree”. This lesson discusses the hidden tree of interconnections that is created when Silverlight controls spawn each other. The logical tree allows multi-level parent-child controls to share information without having to wire up events or employ klugey constructors. Lesson 4: “XAML”. This lesson explains how to use the XAML markup language to instantiate .NET objects, in particular Silverlight controls. Topics include: namespaces, C# equivalents, code-behind and hidden .g.cs files, property element syntax, XAML content property, resources, binding, type converters, events, and pros/cons of XAML versus procedural code. Lessons 1, 2 and 4 come with a .NET solution that contains the demo projects and the projects that are the answers to student exercises.