Adding a Silverlight application to a Master Page

Expression Blend gives designers the ability to design Silverlight applications that display SharePoint data without having connectivity to a SharePoint Server. This functionality greatly reduces the amount of setup and configuration required to enable designers to work with sample data and fine tune Silverlight applications. This lab will guide the reader through an exercise that uses the SharePoint Client Object Model to generate sample data and use the sample data inside Expression Blend to create and design a Silverlight application.

Overview

Because Silverlight applications add rich functionality and enhance the user experience on SharePoint sites, they are frequently part of a custom branding solution. When you need to add a Silverlight application to all the pages in your SharePoint site, you will most likely add the Silverlight application to a master page. SharePoint Designer 2010 provides the features and tools you need to brand SharePoint sites and add Silverlight applications to master pages. This makes SharePoint Designer 2010 the perfect tool for power users who may not have experience developing solutions using Visual Studio 2010, yet still need to enhance the look and feel of their SharePoint sites with Silverlight applications.

Objectives

This lab will demonstrate how you can use a web browser to deploy a Silverlight application to a SharePoint site and display it on a page. To demonstrate these concepts the reader will

• Create a library to store a Silverlight application.
• Create a custom Master Page.
• Customize the custom Master Page to display the Silverlight application.
• Apply the custom Master Page to a SharePoint site.

System Requirements

You must have the following items to complete this lab:

• 2010 Information Worker Demonstration and Evaluation Virtual Machine
• SharePoint Designer 2010

Setup

You must perform the following steps to prepare your computer for this lab...

1. Download the 2010 Information Worker Demonstration and Evaluation Virtual Machine and create the Hyper-V image.

Exercises

This Hands-On Lab comprises the following exercises:

1. Adding a Silverlight application to a master page

Estimated time to complete this lab: 10 minutes.

Starting Materials

This Hands-On Lab includes the following starting materials.

• Visual Studio solutions. The lab provides the following Visual Studio solutions that you can use as starting point for the exercises.
  • <INSTALL>\Labs\AddingSilverlightApplicationToAMasterPage\Source\End\Silverlight.Weather\Silverlight.Weather.sln: A sample Silverlight application used to display weather information.
  Note:

  You will not open the Visual Studio 2010 Solution in this lab exercise. You will use the .xap file the Visual Studio 2010 Solution creates in this lab exercise.