14 DAY TRIAL // Among the resources that accompanied the first Beta release of Silverlight 4 is documentation aimed specifically at developers looking to get a head start on the next generation of Microsoft’s alternative to Adobe Flash. After all, Silverlight 4 Beta is a development milestone designed for devs to start building and testing content for the successor of Silverlight 3, but not much else, and certainly not for end user “consumption,” in the absence of a go-live license.
The Silverlight 4 Beta documentation comes in two flavors, being accessible either via MSDN, or as a standalone download for offline viewing. The MSDN documentation is available via the Silverlight Developer Center along with the resources still offered for Silverlight 3. Developers will, of course, need an Internet connection in order to take advantage of what the MSDN Silverlight Developer Center has to offer.
Not the same is valid for the Microsoft Silverlight 4 Beta Offline Documentation. Just as the title implies, once the download is complete the documentation can be accessed via the CHM (Compiled HTML Help file) even in offline scenarios. The download delivers a packaged .ZIP archive containing the CHM file. Users will first have to extract the contents of the archive in order to get the documentation. Microsoft additionally informs that unblocking the CHM file might also be necessary. Customers will need to right click the file and select Unblock from the options at the bottom.
“Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform implementation of the .NET Framework for building and delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIA) for the Web. Silverlight unifies the capabilities of the server, the Web, and the desktop, of managed code and dynamic languages, of declarative and traditional programming, and the power of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF),” Microsoft noted.
Silverlight 4 Beta is available for download here.