While Learning Silverlight: Part 1

Sun, 20 May 2007 20:08:38 GMT

Like many developers, I'm trying to learn the latest Microsoft technologies including WPF and Silverlight. A big part of learning Silverlight appears to learning what Silverlight is not. Silverlight is not WPF. (This was a surprisingly hard lesson!)

The tools that are currently available such as Orcas Beta 1 and Microsoft Expressions Blend are clearly first generation and are incomplete. As a result, I concluded that my best teacher would be experience and if I wanted to truly understand the technology in a deep way, I should learn to write it by hand first. And so, I cracked open Notepad.exe, a pile of books and MSDN. Soon I had "Hello World" mastered!

Getting beyond "Hello World" was harder. Quickly learned several important difference between WPF, Silverlight and HTML:

Silverlight does not provide layout controls such as Stack, Grid, Table, etc. You are on your own when it comes to handling relative positions.
Silverlight does not support relative sizing. For example, you cannot create a rectangle that is "50%" of the height and width of the canvas.
Most of the common input controls such as CheckBox, ListBox, ComboBox, etc. are missing from the Silverlight arsenal. You will be writing them yourself.
In the absence of common input controls, I'm incredibly concerned about Silverlights ability to ever support Accessibility. That's a shame.

I'm continuing to work my way through more complex examples. I'll continue to report new discoveries.

Bill's Space: Silverlight

While Learning Silverlight: Part 1