Getting started with Silverlight

Last Friday, I’ve decided to start looking at Silverlight. This time, I’ve opted for starting with a book (generally, I prefer to go through the source code and run some tests along the way;). As usual, I’ll be writing a couple of posts to describe my experiences with this platform. Even though I don’t have much to say yet, I thought I’d better start writing about my experiences so that I don’t forget to mention anything along the way.

The first thing I noticed after writing the “Hello, world!” app was that the contents of my Silverlight app are packaged into a xap file.

A xap package is just a zipped file with the contents of your Silverlight application. If you open the file with an app like winrar, this is what you’ll see:

As you can see, the xap file contains all the resources of your app + a manifest file (besides assemblies, you’ll typically end up with other resources like xaml files, images, etc.). Besides simplifying deployment,xap files end up improving the performance of an app. To understand why,just think that with xap, you end up compressing stuff and you’ll get all the stuff your Silverlight app needs in one request. And i guess this is all for this intro post. Stay tuned for more on Silverlight.