From a programmer’s perspective, Silverlight is actually an event-driven programming framework which consists of Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML), and some additional code. Silverlight projects mostly include graphics, audio, and video and every added item finds its place on its control tree.
Silverlight offers an efficient visual control framework for diverse tasks including input, UI rendering, media controls, layouts, gestures, software input panels, and much more. A typical Windows Phone developer can also get project templates for developing basic applications, which are conformity with the new Metro design guidelines. Silverlight offers multiple unique advantages for the developers in the Windows Phone Marketplace making the development process easy and efficient.
Visual controls which act like prebuilt templates are available for completing a number of common tasks. Silverlight for Windows Phone includes by default a number of stock controls: Button, CheckBox, TextBox, MediaElement, the Bing Map control, and more.
On Windows Phone, all Silverlight apps need to be installed to the phone through Windows Marketplace since they cannot be downloaded online. Silverlight includes impeccable visual designers in the form of Visual Studio and Microsoft Expression Blend for the layout and format of pages. Expression Blend, provides extraordinary designer experience and is especially used by developers for creating advanced layouts for Silverlight applications. One needs to check on layouts and rendering to see if they are functional, if there is no designer in place.
Styles can be applied for a particular look and feel which saves developers from lot of effort and work. CSS provides multiple and innovative ways to define the look and feel which will be prevalent throughout the project. Silverlight also offers resource dictionaries and a huge repository of Styles for styling common controls. Styles are applied to font items such as foreground, style, and family too.
Multiple pages are used in some applications which are then navigated in a particular way. It supports a navigation style which is alike the styles of many web browsers, with linear navigation methods of forward and backward along with a history section. Document URIs are used to navigate in between applications with the help of NavigationService found in the framework. Silverlight applications can also be easily integrated into the Windows Phone navigation model.
Most programmers are adept in understanding and creating event-driven programming metaphors. Traditionally, LOB apps which made use of VB, C#, or Java work on an event-driven metaphor. Events are raised and methods call the relevant code in response. This is the preferred model for most form-based mobile apps and even Silverlight accepts this working style.
Silverlight has spelled out support for vector-based image formats in accordance with the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) base. It boasts of high-performance due to the built-in vector-based rendering engine. Normal images might lose picture quality due to pixelation especially when stretched to huge sizes. Vector images on the other hand, make use of geometric paths for drawing so that they are not pixelated when stretched for large sizes. Many other techniques are utilized by Silverlight developers to provide an interactive and enlightening experience to the users.
