Getting started with SharePoint and Silverlight - Part I

This is the first part of a series of postings about how you can use Silverlight and Office SharePoint Server 2007 together. I'm new at Silverlight development - so I will take it one step at a time.

Things you will need to install to get you started right now:

• .NET 3.5 - install this before you install Blend
• Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1
• Silverlight 2.0 SDK Beta 1
• Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 Documentation
• Source code and Unit tests for the Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 Controls
• Expression Blend 2.5 March 2008 Preview
• Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008 - Add-on for Visual Studio 2008 for developing applications for Silverlight 2 Beta 1  

First I took a look at one of the videos on Silverlight.net  - the one with the smiley - Getting started with Silverlight and followed the instructions to create my first Silverlight project. There are some differences with Silverlight 1.0 though. One of the things you will notice immediately is the fact that with 2.0 - Silverlight applications are basically compiled into a .xap file (For more details: take a look at Silverlight: Anatomy of an .XAP file).

Now, let's get this deployed on a VPC which has both SharePoint Server 2007 and Silverlight installed. To make things a little bit easier let's test this first in a separate web site which hasn't been extended by SharePoint.

It is important that you first add both the XAML and XAP MIME extensions to IIS  (See Configuring a web server to host Silverlight Content as well as Configuring MIME Types (IIS 6.0) for more details ...) otherwise your Silverlight app won't work. (Do an iisreset after you added the MIME extensions)

So open up the IIS MMC, create a new website and map it to a folder on your filesystem. Next copy Testpage.html as well as the xap file into this folder. Et voila, your first Silverlight application is deployed ....

In a next posting I will take a look at how to get this same Silverlight app loaded within SharePoint Server 2007.

Tags van Technorati: Microsoft,silverlight,sharepoint+2007,sharepoint,development