Microsoft Silverlight Books

After building an application, people often ask why theirs doesn’t work as well as another similar Silverlight application. The product team answers those questions on a case-by-case basis. However, the root cause of much of this confusion is a lack of knowledge of the inner workings of the system. The functional API description provided by the SDK, Web materials, and other books allow developers to build an application that looks and behaves as they expect but when it comes to problems such as application performance and deployment, a much deeper knowledge of the product is required.

Essential Silverlight 3 provides an under-the-covers look at the design decisions and inner workings of the Silverlight platform from the architect himself, Ashraf Michail. Microsoft Silverlight is a rapidly growing Web technology that allows developers to deliver graphics, video, and rich interactive applications on multiple operating systems and browsers. The availability of material that gives developers behind-the-scenes insight is scarce. Providing insights into the motivating design principles and inner workings of the run-time, this book is for developers who want to get the most out of Silverlight. After reading this book, the reader will have an understanding of why some Silverlight applications work better than others and, with that understanding, will be able to get more out of Silverlight in his or her own applications.

Safari RoughCuts subscribers: Please note that chapters are being updated for Silverlight 3.0. Changes will include

• Chapter 2: Applications
  The addition of “Taking applications” out of the browser and “Offline support”
• Chapter 3: Graphics
  The addition of “3D  perspective transforms” and “Mip-mapping”
• Chapter 5: Input
  The addition of “Mouse wheel support”
• Chapter 6: Animation
  The addition of “Easing support for animations”
• Chapter 8: Data Binding
  The addition of “Element to Element data-binding” and “Data Validation”
• Chapter 9: Media
  Updated to include new supported media formats (H264/AAC)
• Chapter 11: Effects (all new chapter for SL3)
  It will include “New built-in effects” and “Pixel Shaders” and “WriteableBitmap support”
• Chapter 12: GPU Acceleration
  Will cover “How to GPU accelerate your application for faster performance”