Beginning Web Development, Silverlight, and ASP.NET AJAX

CHAPTER 15 ■ ENHANCING THE WEB EXPERIENCE WITH SILVERLIGHT 357
However, if you do this, you will be making life unnecessarily difficult for yourself, as
you will have to manage the location of the XAML, manage the downloading and licensing
of the component, and so on.
Instead, the Silverlight SDK provides tools that make the process a lot easier, and that
provide a de facto standard methodology of using Silverlight on your site.
In the rest of this section, you’ll look at all the pieces that you would use to build any
Silverlight application, from a simple Hello World application to a full-featured web
experience.
Using Silverlight.js
Microsoft provides the file Silverlight.js as part of the Silverlight SDK. This file contains
everything that you need to instantiate and use the Silverlight plug-in on your page. It
manages what to do with different browser versions, and provides a download location
and terms-of-service and license information to the end user, making the download
process safe, secure, and easy.
As Silverlight is a browser plug-in, it is hosted in an HTML page, and your page
should have a script reference to this JavaScript file. This will look something like this:
The Silverlight SDK can be downloaded from the Microsoft Silverlight site, at
http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/.
You’ll see in a moment how this JavaScript library is used to create a Silverlight application—but
first, let’s look at the XAML that it will render.
Using XAML
You saw XAML earlier in this book as a markup language for WPF. Silverlight uses a subset
of this language.
This sample contains a XAML Canvas, the basic drawing block and container in
Silverlight, which in turn contains a TextBlock, which is used for rendering text. This text
is a simple “Hello World!” message.