R – What all do I have to have to start learning Silverlight 2 for free

silverlight-2.0

What do I need to install to begin learning Silverlight 2? I know how to build web applications and use c#, I just have very little experience with Silverlight. I used it a little when it first came out and decided to wait until more .net integration took place. In the past I have used Visual Studio 2005 Pro. for my applications, but now get away with 2008 Express, so I don't have the full version.

I saw this question:

Getting started with Silverlight development

But it is from September. I want to know if anything has changed.

I guess the question should be: What free applications do I install to learn and use in production Silverlight 2?

Thank you.

Best Answer

See Silverlight 2 Released: New controls, tools, announcements!:

The requirement to install the Silverlight Tools is that you have to have Visual Studio 2008 SP1 installed. If you are a Visual Web Developer Express user, these tools work for you as well! You still have to have SP1 of VWD Express, but you can install these tools to developer Silverlight applications. So you can have a free development tools environment for Silverlight with Visual Web Developer Express 2008 SP1 and Silverlight tools!

Here are the Microsoft® Silverlight™ Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1.

I don't think Blend is free, but you can just author all your XAML by hand.

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R – the best way to clone a business object in Silverlight

Here is the code we came up with for cloning. This works in Silverlight 2 & 3.

Public Shared Function Clone(Of T)(ByVal source As T) As T
    Dim serializer As New DataContractSerializer(GetType(T))
    Using ms As New MemoryStream
        serializer.WriteObject(ms, source)
        ms.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin)
        Return DirectCast(serializer.ReadObject(ms), T)
    End Using
End Function

R – What are the server requirements for Silverlight 2

Since Silverlight is a browser technology, it is server-agnostic and can be hosted on a variety of server platforms: LAMP, UNIX, and IIS. You don't have to install .NET or any other Microsoft software on the server.

The only configuration required on the web server is to register the MIME types for content being served. If not already registered, you'll have to add following entries.

There are three MIME types required:

.xaml - application/xaml+xml
.xap - application/x-silverlight-app
.xbap - application/x-ms-xbap

Here are some instructions how to do that for Apache and IIS.

Needless to say, some features such as WMS Streaming rely on a server supporting them.

Best Answer

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R – the best way to clone a business object in Silverlight

R – What are the server requirements for Silverlight 2

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