Silverlight meets SharePoint

The first versions of Silverlight have seen the light in 2007 and 2008 and in July 2009 Silverlight 3 has been released. It is an exciting and promising new technology. Silverlight is a browser plug-in that runs on the client and that can render animations, audio and video. To shorten the learn curve for the developer it exposes a subset of the .NET framework, but it is also able to execute javascript and to interact with other elements on the HTML page.

SharePoint 2007 is tightly integrated with the familiar Office applications and provides a consistent user experience that simplifies how people interact with content, processes, and business data. It offers a robust out-of-the-box functionality to create large intranets, extranets and public facing sites.

Silverlight can be used to enrich your SharePoint sites but it can also play an important functional role. You can integrate Silverlight somewhat everywhere in SharePoint 2007.In this series of samples I’m going to demonstrate a number of scenarios where Silverlight can play a useful role.

• hosting Silverlight 3 in a simple web part
• hosting Silverlight 3 in a simple SharePoint application page
• Walkthrough 1 – The Job Opportunity list or how to integrate Silverlight 3 in a custom list definition (part 1) 
• Walkthrough 2 – The Job Opportunities web part or how to host Silverlight 3 in a Content Editor Web Part
• Walkthrough 3 – The Job Application list or how to integrate Silverlight 3 in a custom list definition (part 2)
• Walkthrough 4 – The Job Application Manager page or how to integrate Silverlight 3 applications on a custom application page and make them talk to each other

Have fun with it! Suggestions and questions are welcome.