Introduction to Silverlight

An
Introduction to
Silverlight
Ed Donahue
Academic Developer Evangelist

ed.donahue@microsoft.com
creepyed.com | @creepyed

Ed Donahue
Salsa dancer
Light jogger
Casual cyclist
Swimmer
Triathlete (for those
counting)
Computer science major
Lover of monospaced
fonts
Supporter of women
in tech
Microsoft Academic
Developer Evangelist
2
ed.donahue@microsoft.com | www.creepyed.com | @creepyed

Topics
 The Metro design style
 Silverlight Components
 Creating a Silverlight Application
 Silverlight and XAML
 Introduction to Silverlight Layout
 Components and Events
 Silverlight Project Templates
 ApplicationBar
 Page Navigation
 Demos available here: http://bit.ly/EdDemos

Windows Phone

Looking for training kits?

 Windows Phone 7 Mango Training Kit

http://bit.ly/wp7mangotraining

Windows Phone

Help moving from other
platforms?
 Leverage your iPhone dev skills

http://bit.ly/ios2wp7

 Leverage your Android dev skills

http://bit.ly/android2wp7

Windows Phone 5

Windows Phone and Metro

 To make life easier for us the Metro style is
“baked in” to the Windows developer tools
 The default appearance, behaviour and fonts
of the user elements all match the style
 If you want to find out more about Metro on
phone you can read the “User Experience
Design Guidelines”

http://bit.ly/DesignGuideWP7

Windows Phone

Tools for the job : Graphical
Design separates the
Good planning
graphical design aspects from the
programming
 The designer works on the look
and feel of the application
 The programmer implements
the required behaviours
 Silverlight is designed to support this
 A Silverlight designer can use the
“Expression Blend” to specify the
appearance of the user interface
 A version of Blend for the
phone is supplied as part of the
phone SDK

Windows Phone

Metro Templates and
Components
 Visual Studio
provides a set of
Metro project
templates
 Each of them
maps onto a
particular style of
application

Windows Phone

Application Types and Templates

 The three application types provide quite different user experiences
 Select the one that you feel is the most appropriate
Windows Phone

Silverlight display elements

 Application title
 Page title
 First number
 Plus text
 Second number
 Equals button
 Result text

Windows Phone

Elements in AddingMachine

 The adding machine actually contains three different types of Silverlight
display elements
 TextBox
 Used to receive user input from the keyboard
 TextBlock
 Used to display messages to the user
 Button
 Used to cause events in the application

Windows Phone

Elements and XAML
<Grid x:Name="ContentPanel" Grid.Row="1" Margin="12,0,12,0">
<TextBox Height="72" HorizontalAlignment="Left"
Margin="8,19,0,0" Name="firstNumberTextBox"
Text="0" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="460"
TextAlignment="Center" />
. . .
<Button Content="equals" Height="72"
HorizontalAlignment="Left"
Margin="158,275,0,0" Name="equalsButton"
VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="160"
Click="equalsButton_Click" />
. . .
</Grid>

 XAML is the markup language that describes the Silverlight UI
components

Windows Phone

Grid container element
. . .
. . .
</Grid>

 Grid is a container into which you can position display elements

Windows Phone

TextBox element
. . .
. . .
</Grid>

 TextBox is used for text entry
 TextBlock can be used for text display

Windows Phone

Button element
. . .
. . .
</Grid>

 Button is used for user actions and generates events when activated

Windows Phone

Button element
. . .
. . .
</Grid>

 Click is the button clicked event which is bound to the method
specified

Windows Phone

Button click event handler
private void equalsButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
float v1 = float.Parse(firstNumberTextBox.Text);
float v2 = float.Parse(secondNumberTextBox.Text);

float result = v1 + v2;

resultTextBlock.Text = result.ToString();
}

 The event hander for the button takes the values out of the textboxes,
parses them and then calculates and displays the result

Windows Phone

Demo

The Silverlight Adding Machine

21

Best Practice: Keyboard use

 It is best if the user can still press
the equals button when the
keyboard is displayed
 This means the equals button
should be moved up the screen

Windows Phone

Selecting Orientations
SupportedOrientations="Portrait"

SupportedOrientations="PortraitOrLandscape"

 A XAML property for the phone application page lets you select the
orientation options available
 Your application can bind to an event which is fired when the orientation
changes

Windows Phone

Using a StackPanel
<StackPanel>
<TextBox Height="72" HorizontalAlignment="Center" .../>
<TextBlock Height="56" HorizontalAlignment="Center" .../>
<TextBox Height="72" HorizontalAlignment="Center" .../>
<Button Content="equals" Height="72" ...>
<TextBlock Height="46" HorizontalAlignment="Center" .../>
</StackPanel>
</Grid>

 To automatically handle orientation change we can use a StackPanel
container that will stack the display components

Windows Phone

Demo

Orientation Handling

25

Handling errors
try
{
v1 = float.Parse(firstNumberTextBox.Text);
v2 = float.Parse(secondNumberTextBox.Text);
}
catch
{
MessageBox.Show("Invalid number");
return;
}

 A program can catch errors as on the desktop
 There is also a MessageBox mechanism as well

Windows Phone

Configuring the input scope
<TextBox InputScope="Number" ...

 If all you want from the user is a number it is
dangerous to allow them to enter text as well
 You can add to the XAML to specify that the
keyboard only accepts numbers

Windows Phone

Demo

Complete Adding
Machine

28

Application Chrome
System Tray and Application Bar
 System Tray
 System owned indicator area that
displays system-level status information
 Apps can show/hide
 Microsoft.Phone.Shell.SystemTray.IsVisib
le = false;
 Application Bar
 Area where applications can display
buttons for the most common tasks
 Can display pop-up menu for less
common tasks

Windows Phone

Application Bar in Xaml
<phone:PhoneApplicationPage
x:Class=“MyApp.MainPage”
… >

<phone:PhoneApplicationPage.ApplicationBar>
<shell:ApplicationBar x:Name="AppBar" IsMenuEnabled="True">
<shell:ApplicationBar.Buttons>
<shell:ApplicationBarIconButton x:Name="NewContactButton"
IconUri="Images/appbar.new.rest.png" Text="New"
Click="NewContactButton_Click"/>
<shell:ApplicationBarIconButton x:Name="SearchButton"
IconUri="Images/appbar.feature.search.rest.png"
Text="Find" Click="SearchButton_Click"/>
</shell:ApplicationBar.Buttons>
<shell:ApplicationBar.MenuItems>
<shell:ApplicationBarMenuItem x:Name="GenerateMenuItem"
Text="Generate Data" Click="GenerateMenuItem_Click" />
<shell:ApplicationBarMenuItem x:Name="ClearMenuItem"
Text="Clear Data" Click="ClearMenuItem_Click" />
</shell:ApplicationBar.MenuItems>
</shell:ApplicationBar>
</phone:PhoneApplicationPage.ApplicationBar>

Windows Phone

App Bar & Landscape

Windows Phone

Frame and Page
 Frame
 Top-level container control
 PhoneApplicationFrame class
 Contains the page control and
system elements such as
system tray and application bar
 Page
 Fills the entire content region of
the frame
 PhoneApplicationPage-derived
class
 Contains a title
 Optionally surfaces its own
application bar
Windows Phone

Page Navigation
 Silverlight on Windows Phone uses
a Page-based navigation model
 Similar to web page model
 Each page identified by a URI
 Each page is essentially stateless

private void hyperlinkButton1_Click(
object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
NavigationService.Navigate(
new Uri("/SecondPage.xaml",
UriKind.RelativeOrAbsolute)
);
}

Windows Phone

Navigating Back
 Application can provide controls
to navigate back to preceding
page
private void button1_Click(
object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
NavigationService.GoBack();
}

 The hardware Back key will also
navigate back to preceding page
 No code required – built-in
behaviour

Windows Phone

Demo

ApplicationBar and Page Navigation

38

Review

 Windows Phone applications use Silverlight to express the design of
their user interface
 The design is expressed in a XAML text file that identifies and
configures display elements
 Elements can also be manipulated as code objects
 There are a set of Silverlight templates for applications and elements
based on the Metro design
 You can create multiple Silverlight pages and add them to your project
 Navigation to pages is performed on the basis of uri (Uniform Resource
Indicator) values
 The back button normally navigates back to the source page, but this
can be overridden
 The uri can contain simple text messages
Windows Phone
 Pages can share larger objects in the App.xaml page

Bonus
(and really good to know)

Silverlight Toolkit for Windows
Phone the Microsoft Silverlight team
A product of
 The Silverlight Toolkit adds tons of additional controls „out of band‟ from
the official product control set
 Includes full open source code, samples, documentation, and design-
time support for controls
 Refresh every 3 months or so
 Bug fixes
 New controls
 http://silverlight.codeplex.com

Introduction to Silverlight

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