Getting Started with Silverlight development

Over time a few people have contacted me about the missing WatermarkedTextbox from Scott Guthrie’s Digg sample for Silverlight he created a while back.  I had posted the updated code and binaries for WatermarkedTextbox here for you to use if you wish. 

NOTE: Incidentally this is the same code that is actually in the DateTimeTextBox that is included in the Silverlight Toolkit if you just want to use that :-).

After thinking about it though, I decided to take a stab at updating this getting started guide for new developers to Silverlight to incorporate some new features.  This isn’t for you folks that have already got your feet wet.  This is the Hello World –> have something complete in a few steps crowd.  Does it use Prism or MVVM?  No, not yet.  I think I wanted to keep simplicity to help people get started and then refactor from there.

Here’s the breakdown that I created (similar to Scott’s original flow):

• Part 1: Really getting started – the tools you need and getting your first Hello World
• Part 2: Defining UI Layout – understanding layout and using Blend to help
• Part 3: Accessing data – how to get data from where
• Part 4: Binding the data – once you get the data, how can you use it?
• Part 5: Integrating additional controls – using controls that aren’t a part of the core
• Part 6: Polishing the UI with styles and templates
• Part 7: Taking the application out-of-browser
• Watch a video of these steps for a walk-through: Twitter Search Monitor Video Tutorial

I hope this helps some folks and refreshes our getting started content for the newbies!  I’m also going to try to refactor this simple application a few times to help learn the Model-View-ViewModel approach to XAML development so be sure to subscribe to my feed for updates.