MSDN Magazine - November 2008 - (Page 81)

RIA Light Up SharePoint With Silverlight 2 Web Parts Steve Fox and Paul Stubbs In the world of Web-based application development, users are demanding ever-improved application experiences. Further, the demands of these Web-based applications go beyond supporting a single browser technology or platform. If you are building a Web app today, you need technologies that support not only a way to deliver a more compelling user experience, but also that enable developers to deliver this experience quickly to multiple technologies and audiences. Silverlight 2 is one example of a technology that enables robust Web application development opportunities. Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in that provides developers access to a rich programming model for building Web-based user experiences. SharePoint is another technology that is frequently being used for Web-based application development. Companies that invested in SharePoint for intranet development now want to extend this technology out to externally facing Web sites. Together, Silverlight and SharePoint provide a simple, yet powerful, infrastructure for building intranet and extranet applications with sophisticated user interface designs and interactions. In this article, we’ll discuss one of the key ways in which you can use SharePoint and Silverlight together by integrating a Silverlight application within a SharePoint Web Part. We start by walking you through building a fairly simple media application using Silverlight 2 Beta 2 (see Figure 1). We’ll then show how you can use the SharePoint Web Part as a wrapper for your Silverlight application. This is an interesting approach because it enables you to not only create isolated hosted applications, but also interconnect the Web Parts through the native SharePoint object model—for example, through a provider/consumer model. Creating the Media Player Silverlight 2, in beta 2 as we go to press, is quite an evolution from Silverlight 1.0. For example, Silverlight 2 supports managed code, so in addition to JavaScript, you can now use Visual Basic and C# in your applications. Further, Silverlight 2 ships with a set of controls and facilitates the extension of controls to make the job of creating Silverlight-based user interfaces much easier. The designer expeThis article is based on a prerelease version of Silverlight 2. All information is subject to change. This article discusses: • Creating a Silverlight media player • Creating the Web Part • Deploying to a SharePoint site • Troubleshooting the app Technologies discussed: Silverlight 2, SharePoint November 2008 81

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of MSDN Magazine - November 2008

Contents MSDN Magazine - November 2008 Toolbox CLR Inside Out Data Points Cutting Edge Security Briefs Test Your Security IQ Agile SDL Access Control Utility Spotlight RIA Test Run Wicked Code Foundations Team System End Bracket

MSDN Magazine - November 2008

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