Datasheet

13
Chapter 1: Adding Silverlight to Your Web Development Toolkit
✓ Support for drawing vector graphic images and doing 3-D perspective
transformations
✓ Support for creating storyboards and animations
✓ A full suite of controls, such as text boxes and buttons, and support for
creating your own controls
✓ Layout management support, which allows you to lay out controls in a
variety of ways
✓ Styling of controls, which allows the properties of your controls to be
standardized and reused
✓ Skinning, which allows you to change the complete appearance of
controls
✓ Support for data binding, which seamlessly binds data and control
properties
✓ Multi-touch support, which allows you to use hand gestures and touch
interactions on hardware that supports it
✓ Support for hooking on to webcams and microphones to share video
and audio with others
✓ Support for media streaming, allowing audio and video to be streamed
according to the optimal bit rate based on the network speed
✓ The ability to create Silverlight applications to be run on mobile phones
that are part of the Windows Phone 7 series.
This set of features helps developers easily provide a rich interactive user
experience.
Although the base class library in Silverlight is a cut-down version of the .NET
framework, it still uses the same namespaces as the full version and supports
a wide variety of features such as multithreading, generics, and even Language
Integrated Query (LINQ). In addition, the framework adds support for WCF RIA
Services, which helps build Silverlight applications in a multitier environment
while allowing applications to work in offline scenarios at the same time.
Other feature highlights of Silverlight include support for connecting to Web
services, peer-to-peer communication, and access to local storage.
In spite of all these features, Silverlight itself runs in a sandboxed environment.
This means that for security reasons, the Silverlight application cannot
access system resources or invoke API calls on the machine it is running on.
This feature prevents malicious applications from taking over your computer
without your knowledge.
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