Chapter 1, Overview of Silverlight, is an introductory chapter to Silverlight that covers core concepts of the framework.

Chapter 2, Laying out Our User Interface, gives you an introduction to building user interfaces in Silverlight. The chapter covers core concepts, such as panels, navigation framework, and playing media files.

Chapter 3, Enhancing the User Interface, builds upon the foundations learned in the previous chapter, and arms you with advanced techniques, such as animations and behaviors, for building a better and richer user interface.

Chapter 4, Implementing Application Logic, deals mainly with adding logic to your UI. You will learn all about concepts, such as consuming services, and building dependency properties, which will help you make your application more than just a pretty face.

Chapter 5, Working with Data, introduces you to the world of handling data in Silverlight. You will learn all about binding, formatting, validating, and conversion of data.

Chapter 6, Interacting with the Host Platform, guides you through how to use the host of your Silverlight application to perform tasks, such as printing, copy/pasting, and more.

Chapter 7, Structuring Applications, covers how to make your code look cleaner, and behave better.

Chapter 8, Deploying Applications, packs things up by diving deep into configuring the Silverlight plugin, and reducing its size by dynamically loading resources.

For this book, you will need Visual Studio 2010. In addition, you will need the Silverlight development tools, which can be downloaded from http://www.silverlight.net/getting-started for free, and a copy of Microsoft Expression Blend 4, which has a 60-day free trial version available at http://www.microsoft.com/expression/try-it/.

This book is for anyone who wishes to learn the essential skills needed to pass the Microsoft Silverlight MCTS exam, and use these skills to build rich interactive applications using the Silverlight platform.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: " We have already seen the Inline properties when we declared our Button control—Width, Height, Content, and x:Name are all Inline properties."

A block of code is set as follows:

<Button Width="100" Height="40" x:Name="btnSubmit">
<Button.Content>
<Image Source="fun.png"/>
</Button.Content>
</Button>

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: " Open Visual Studio 2010, click on New Project..., select Silverlight from the Installed Templates list on the left-hand side of the window, and click on Silverlight Application."

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