Notes on the samples

We recommend that you create and build all the samples from scratch, using the source code provided with the book just as a way to check your work.

WPF experts with no previous Silverlight experience might have difficulty creating, starting, and understanding Silverlight applications, so there is Appendix A, Creating and starting a Silverlight project, describing how to do it.

Silverlight only has a subset of WPF functionality, for example, it does not have data and property triggers, and its event triggers can only react to a loaded event. MS Expression Blend SDK provides functionality to mitigate these deficiencies, as well as many other exciting features. Expression Blend SDK DLLs are free and fully redistributable and are provided with the samples under the MSExpressionBlendSDKDll folder. Expression Blend SDK does not require Expression Blend (which we are not using anyways).

Follow the instructions within Appendix B, Changing the XAML formatting, if you want to format your XAML file to have each XML attribute on a separate line as we do in our sample code.

In order to format your C# code similar to the code in our samples, please install and use the snippets provided under the Snippets folder (which is part of the sample code that comes with the book). Information on installing and using snippets is available in Appendix C, Installing snippets, and Appendix D, Using snippets, respectively.