In my previous post, I mentioned my interests and things I want to talk about in 2010, the first thing I mentioned is Silverlight, my knowledge about Silverlight now on a scale from 0 to 10 is just 0.5, actually I know nothing except that it I want to know everything, so here by I show all the topics I want to learn; not in any order.

So other than the titles, a small introduction on Silverlight needs to be done then next parts will start the actually good things,

Silverlight Introduction

I thought the best way to introduce what is Silverlight is to ask the usual WH questions and here are they;

What?

Silverlight is a cross-browser (works on any browser Internet Explorer, FireFox, Safari, Opera and recently Chrome), cross-platform (Windows, Mac and Linux) plugin for building and delivering the rich interactive applications for the web. It only needs a plugin to be installed.

When?

Silverlight 1.0 was first released in 2007, in November 2008 the second release of Silverlight 2, 6 months later Silverlight 3 was out there, and now here we are with Silverlight 4 beta

Where?

If you are running Windows install the runtime from here.

If you are on a Mac download and install from here.

How?

To start building silverlight applications you can install the developer tools for Silverlight. If you don't have Visual Web Developer, download both using Web Platform Installer. This will install the SDK, developer runtimes, and Visual Studio project templates. If you already have Visual Studio, download the tools directly (the Silverlight 3 SDK is also available as a standalone download). For additional information, read the Overview and the Silverlight 3 Release Notes. 

For Silverlight 4 download the tools from here 

Until now I have not finalized the plan so I would love to hear whats your opinion. Is something missing? Is something not needed?

NOTE: If you haven't read the first post in this series, I would encourage you do to that first, or check out the Sharepoint category. You can also always subscribe to the feeds.

The Sharepoint 2007 System introduces two types of pages the first type usually called Application Pages and other type called Site Pages.

As a sharepoint developer you should know both of these types of pages and when to use them, so let me define them here briefly and show some differences between them to help you decide which type of pages you will want to use when developing in sharepoint.

Application Pages

Application Pages are non customizable and are found in  the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS, its worthy to note that this physical directory is mapped to the virtual _layouts directory whenever WSS/MOSS creates a new Web application in the IIS. By using this mapping scheme along with some additional processing logic, the WSS/MOSS runtime can make each application page accessible within the context of any site in the farm.

When building custom application pages you should use the Microsoft.Sharepoint.LayoutsPageBase as a base class and should be content pages that reference to the ~/_layouts/application.master master page, Application Pages might include in line code or have a code behind file compiled in a dll, to deploy application pages they should be the LAYOUTS directory and all custom code dlls either in the GAC.More...

A new feature in the Sharepoint 2007 is the "Feature" development style which means that every tiny and huge development task in the sharepoint is considered a "Feature".

Features can be activated or deactivated through a site administrator, which enables the very simple turn on/off of anything in the site.

Features are used for developing anything starting from a small button to a full site definition and tons of files and functions including webparts, workflows, lists, pages, content types, document libraries and others. I will try to include the development of all these topics in this series wish me luck and provide feedback. More...