Silverlight is an exciting technology. There are technological aspects to Silverlight that convince me it will be a viable platform in the years ahead. I think Silverlight and its Linux implementation, Moonlight, will prove interesting to all developers, regardless of whether they have .NET experience. Silverlight brings the advantages of XAML and a CLR, and a set of useful platform libraries, to operating systems other than Windows. Someone once commented that Silverlight is where I placed my bet, and this is definitely true. I’ve upped the ante by investing the time and energy to write this book. Accelerated Silverlight 2 aims to get you up to speed as efficiently as possible on Silverlight, and I hope you find what you’re looking for within its pages. If you have any questions or problems, please get in touch with me using the contact information at the end of the Introduction, and I’ll help. I also have a site specifically devoted to this book, www.acceleratedsilverlight.net/, which provides a place for readers to get questions answered and extend some of the topics discussed in this book.

Who This Book Is For

This book assumes you have a reasonable degree of familiarity with .NET, such as understanding what assemblies are and how to develop on the .NET platform using C#. The goal of this book is to get you up to speed on Silverlight as efficiently as possible. Although Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) also uses XAML (which you’ll learn about in Chapter 2, in case you’re unfamiliar with this term), you do not need to be familiar with WPF.