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Chapter 1: Adding Silverlight to Your Web Development Toolkit
Silverlight Toolkit
The Silverlight Toolkit is a collection of controls and utilities for Silverlight
that supplements what is already present in the core Silverlight libraries. The
Silverlight Toolkit includes additional controls (such as charts) that are very
useful but aren’t used daily by applications. If Microsoft had included these
controls in the main Silverlight runtime application, it would have become
unwieldy and too big to download in a reasonable amount of time. By separating
this set of controls from the main application, Microsoft left it up to developers
to decide which parts to include in their application. In addition, it allows
Microsoft to make frequent updates to the toolkit outside the release cycle of
Silverlight.
WCF RIA Services
When you start creating large applications that have multiple screens and
that connect to a database to read and write data, you need to design your
application well. As part of this design, you need to divide your application
into multiple layers, or tiers. An application is typically divided into the
following tiers:
✓ Presentation: Focuses on the user interface
✓ Application: Focuses on application logic, such as validating user input
or performing calculations
✓ Data: Focuses on how to read and write the data used by the application
WCF RIA Services is a framework for creating multitier applications in
Silverlight, incorporating data operations such as authentication, authorization,
data validation, and other essential services across the different tiers. It
integrates with ASP.NET and provides ways to share code among the different
tiers. WCF RIA Services is explained in more detail in Chapters 12 and 13.
Deep Zoom Composer
Deep Zoom Composer helps in creating the zooming and panning effect of
images that you see in the Hard Rock Café Memorabilia site mentioned earlier
in this chapter. Figure 1-7 shows Deep Zoom Composer being used to create
a similar application. We tell you more about using Deep Zoom Composer in
Chapter 15.
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