Datasheet

20
Part I: Illuminating Silverlight
Figure 1-7:
Deep Zoom
composer in
action.
Creating Rich User Experiences
in Silverlight
Rich Internet applications such as Silverlight aim to provide a dynamic
experience for Web site users. This dynamism comes in the form of graphics,
animation, audio, and video, and Silverlight supports all these features. In
fact, Silverlight 1.0 was all about playing audio and video files in a browser,
and nothing more.
So what kind of audio and video files work in Silverlight? In addition to MP3
files for audio, Silverlight supports a range of audio and video formats,
including High Definition (HD)-quality video. Even the formats that it does
not currently support can be easily converted into a supported format using
Expression Encoder.
Graphics is another key area for providing rich user interfaces. Silverlight
provides shape objects such as an ellipse, a line, a polyline, a rectangle, and
a polygon that designers can modify to suit their needs. In addition, you can
draw complex shapes using an object in XAML called Path. You can apply
transformations on these vector graphic images to create 3-D effects and
animations.
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