Flash to Silverlight
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You do Flash and now you want to add Silverlight to your skillset?
You've come to the right place.
Downloads
The Silverlight community has access to a wide-array of useful tools, code libraries and resources and they are constantly build new utilities to share. The resources available for download have been categorized into three levels Essential, Optional, Specialty.
Essential Downloads
As the name implies, these are the essential tools for creating Silverlight projects. Technically you only need the Silverlight SDK installed, but the process will be a lot more productive and fun with Blend and Visual Studio.
Expression Blend 3
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Expression Blend is the interactive design tool for building Silverlight projects. Blend provides not only a visual design surface for graphics, animation, skinning and layout but it also includes advanced new functionality like: SketchFlow, behaviors that add interactivity without code, sample and design-time data for dynamic applications and high-fidelity Photoshop and Illustrator import.
Visual Studio 2008
- 90-day Trial
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The ultimate in tool for any .NET developer, Silverlight developer and adventurous designers find Visual Studio to be an essential tool. It has the best code editor, debugging, testing, data access features and much more. In order to build Silverlight 3 application, make sure you upgrade to Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1.
In addition there is a free light version of Visual Studio available called Visual Web Developer Express that is worth checking out.
Silverlight 3 Tools for Visual Studio 2008
Once you have Visual Studio and Service Pack 1 installed you need to install the Silverlight 3 Tools. The tools include the Silverlight 3 developer runtime, Silverlight 3 SDK, the project templates, intellisense, remote debugging for Mac and more.
Optional Downloads
Now that you have the essentials installed and ready to go, let’s take at optional resources that provide a variety of additional features.
Silverlight Toolkit
The Toolkit includes 30+ additional controls and the source code for each control and the sample application. The source code can be very useful to look through when creating your own custom controls. Along with controls, the toolkit includes useful utilities and 11 themes.
WCF RIA Services
WCF RIA Services provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to data for queries, changes and custom operations. It essentially provides the glue between your Silverlight application running on the client and the services running on your server.
Behaviors Sample Pack
The Behaviors Samples Pack is additional set of 25 Behaviors on top of the default behaviors that come with Blend. New functionality provided includes Media Behaviors, Mouse Triggers, Data Behaviors, State Behaviors and a few experimental ones.
Kaxaml
Kaxaml is a lightweight XAML editor that gives you a "split view" so you can see both your XAML and your rendered content. Kaxaml can be very useful as a flexible editor for creating styles or control skins.
Speciality Downloads
Expression Encoder
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Encodes a wide array of video file formats, provides live streaming from webcams, camcorders or screen captures of your PC. Additional the output of a job can include a Silverlight MediaPlayer with many different skins. As an added bonus, once Encoder is installed Blend will make the MediaPlayer control available for your own applications.
Deep Zoom Composer
With Deep Zoom Composer, you can take a collection of images of various resolutions (including large, high-resolution images) and arrange them into a composition. You can then export or publish the composition as either a single high-resolution image or a set of individual images with different resolutions. Once you export or publish your composition, you can use a standard broadband connection to quickly display and navigate a large, detailed image or a panorama of images that might otherwise be extremely slow to view.
WriteableBitmapEx
The WriteableBitmapEx library is a collection of extension methods for Silverlight's WriteableBitmap. Building on the WriteableBitmap class in Silverlight, this library adds functionality for simple Get and SetPixel methods, fast line drawing algorithms, blitting with blend modes and more.
Silverlight Augmented Reality Toolkit
SLARToolkit is a flexible Augmented Reality library for Silverlight with the aim to make real time Augmented Reality applications with Silverlight as easy and fast as possible. It can be used with Silverlight's Webcam API or with any other CaptureSource or a WriteableBitmap.
SilverSprite
Run XNA games without code changes in Silverlight 2 or 3. SpriteBatch based graphics only, no 3D. Since the game compiles into straight Silverlight code, it will run anywhere that Silverlight can.
Pixel Shader Effects Library
A libray of sample WPF and Silverlight effects written in HLSL. You can download the code to use the effects in your own applications or check out the source code to learn how to write your own. Effects included: BandedSwirl, ColorKeyAlpha, DirectionalBlur, Embossed, InvertColor, Magnify, Monochrome, Pinch, Pixelate, ZoomBlur and more.
Shazzam
Shazzam is a simple utility that provides an easy way to edit and test Pixel Shader Effects.
Gestalt
Gestalt is a way to write Ruby, Python & XAML code in your (X)HTML pages. It enables you to build richer and more powerful web applications by marrying the benefits of expressive languages, modern compilers, AJAX & RIAs with the write » save » refresh development model of the web.
