Silverlight is a relatively new technology introduced by Microsoft in order to enable the developers to build multi-platform client GUI applications that can run within or outside of Internet browsers.

Silverlight empowers developers with great new GUI capabilities, combined with revolutionary GUI coding concepts that came to Silverlight from WPF. While some think that HTML 5 gives the developers functionality that is almost as powerful as Silverlight, the programming model of HTML 5 is indisputably old, while the Silverlight/WPF programming model is ahead of that of any competing software.

Unlike the currently available versions of HTML, Silverlight is 98 percent multi-platform (between Windows and Macs) and its list of non multi-platform features is freely available. As long as you avoid using those features, any application you build for Windows is guaranteed to run on Mac.

Silverlight is close to being 100 percent multi-browser (if there are any features that do not perform the same on different browsers, I am not aware of them) and any application you write using Internet Explorer is guaranteed to run within Firefox on the same platform, while this might not be the case with HTML.

Silverlight has a very small footprint – in order to make Silverlight 5 run on your machine you need to download and install only a 6 MB package.

Silverlight makes it very easy to deploy your application via the Internet, whether it is a browser-based application or not.

Microsoft Phone uses Silverlight as its primary coding platform.

Microsoft pedalled back on Silverlight as they decided that Silverlight might undermine their Windows platform. The Windows 8 platform uses many Silverlight concepts, but is strictly Windows oriented.

Apple does not allow plugins for their iPhone and iPad browsers, since plugins undermine their Apple store application model. Microsoft followed suit and Windows 8 browsers for tablets and phones will not support Silverlight as a browser plugin. To the best of my knowledge, Windows 8 tablets will continue to run Silverlight applications outside of browsers. The Windows 8 programing model, however, is very similar to Silverlight and it should be easy to convert your Silverlight application to Windows 8.

There is a lot of buzz around HTML 5 being able to do everything that Silverlight does, and, undeniably, the HTML 5 application will run on the platforms so far closed to Silverlight – iPads, iPhones, and Android systems. From my point of view, while HTML 5 is a great technology, it does not address the questions that have plagued the HTML/JavaScript technology from the outset – namely its programming paradigms are not strong enough to support coding complex business logic. Additionally, HTML 5 will not run on many of the existing desktop browsers, so if someone wants to build a website available to everyone they usually have to use HTML 4.

This book is about creating animations using Silverlight technology.

Chapter 1, Building Blocks of Animation, talks about the Silverlight concepts used for animation: dependency and attached properties, bindings, transforms, and storyboards.

Chapter 2, Animations in Business Logic Silverlight Applications, talks about using VisualStateManager for custom control animations and animation navigation transitions.

Chapter 3, Creating Animated Textures, talks about using Perlin noise for generating random processes such as clouds and fire.

Chapter 4, 3D Animations in Silverlight, talks about using Perspective Transform for simple 3D animations and also covers using a subset of the XNA functionality in Silverlight for more complex animations.

Chapter 5, Building an Animated Banner, talks about creating a Silverlight animated banner and integrating it into an HTML page.

The following software should be installed in order for the reader to be able to run the samples:

We assume that the reader already has basic knowledge of Silverlight or WPF programming concepts. One should not use this book to learn Silverlight or WPF basics.

We recommend that you create and build all the samples from scratch, using the source code provided with the book just as a way to check your work.

WPF experts with no previous Silverlight experience might have difficulty creating, starting, and understanding Silverlight applications, so there is Appendix A, Creating and starting a Silverlight project, describing how to do it.

Silverlight only has a subset of WPF functionality, for example, it does not have data and property triggers, and its event triggers can only react to a loaded event. MS Expression Blend SDK provides functionality to mitigate these deficiencies, as well as many other exciting features. Expression Blend SDK DLLs are free and fully redistributable and are provided with the samples under the MSExpressionBlendSDKDll folder. Expression Blend SDK does not require Expression Blend (which we are not using anyways).

Follow the instructions within Appendix B, Changing the XAML formatting, if you want to format your XAML file to have each XML attribute on a separate line as we do in our sample code.

In order to format your C# code similar to the code in our samples, please install and use the snippets provided under the Snippets folder (which is part of the sample code that comes with the book). Information on installing and using snippets is available in Appendix C, Installing snippets, and Appendix D, Using snippets, respectively.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."

A block of code is set as follows:

public double RotationAngle
{
    get { return (double)GetValue(RotationAngleProperty); }
    set { SetValue(RotationAngleProperty, value); }
}

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes, for example, appear in the text like this: "You can start the browser displaying our Silverlight banner within that HTML page by right-clicking on the file within Solution Explorer and choosing View in Browser".

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