SharePoint 2010 and Silverlight

Was working on a presentation on SharePoint 2010 and Silverlight.

Finally, I get to marry my two favourite technologies in one awesome demo.

 

There’s not a lot of people blogging about this yet, but what we were digging up was very delightful.

In bullet point form – because this is a brain dump blog post, and if you want to know how everything ties together you’ll have to catch up to one of the user groups where I present this stuff (or Adam Cogan… he gets around a lot more than me):

Technologies that made it possible:

  • SharePoint web services
  • SharePoint REST / OData services NEW
    • This is actually great news for the AJAX / JavaScript crowd.  Technically, you can write JQuery solutions that will query SharePoint for you.
  • Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.dll(s), and the corresponding Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Silverlight.dll(s) – which are awesome wrappers
  • CAML is nearly gone, but still lingers on for huge data processing.
  • LINQ to SharePoint is the new crafting knife
  • Silverlight XAP files can be uploaded anywhere
  • Silverlight web part can load XAP files and run them
    • So a user that can upload a short movie to SharePoint, then configure a Silverlight movie player to play that movie… already has the permissions required to run custom XAP applications.
  • Which, if you stop and think about it, is a “different” deployment model!