- Silverlight Web Parts
- Manually Building a Silverlight Web Part
- Visual Studio Silverlight Web Parts Extension
- Building a Silverlight Web Part
- Building a Custom Silverlight Web Part
- Connecting Web Parts
- Summary
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Visual Studio Silverlight Web Parts Extension
Microsoft has created a Visual Studio extension to automatically build Silverlight Web Parts. With this extension you can avoid doing all of the manual steps from the previous section. The extension also has a couple of other nice features, such as it automatically creates the web part for you and creates a test page that hosts the Silverlight Web Part. This makes it simple to add a Silverlight Web Part project item and press F5 and have a fully functional Silverlight Web Part created for you without any other steps for you to do.
Installing the Extension
The Silverlight Web Part project item templates are not part of Visual Studio out-of-the-box, so you need to download them from the Visual Studio Gallery and install them. But Visual Studio has made this process very easy and quick to not only install but uninstall as well. In fact it is built directly into Visual Studio.
Before you install the Silverlight SharePoint web parts extension, you need to install the Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Power Tools extension. Click Tools and then Extension Manager from the main menu. In the Extension Manager Gallery click Online Gallery from the menu on the left. When the online gallery loads, enter Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Power Tools in the search box. Click the Download button. Follow the prompts to download and install the extension.
Click Tools and then Extension Manager from the main menu. In the Extension Manager Gallery click Online Gallery from the menu on the left. When the online gallery loads, enter Silverlight SharePoint Web Parts in the search box. Click the Download button, as shown in Figure 5.4. Follow the prompts to download and install the extension.
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Figure 5.4 Visual Studio Extension Manager
The extension does have a dependency on another extension that Microsoft ships called the Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Power Tools, as shown in Figure 5.5. This extension adds support for sandboxed compatible Visual Web Parts. If you see this warning, click Close and install the Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Power Tools first. Also be sure to restart Visual Studio after installing the power tools extension.
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Figure 5.5 Dependency Alert
Click Install to accept the EULA and install the extension, as shown in Figure 5.6.
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Figure 5.6 Install Visual Studio Extension
You can confirm that both extensions are installed from the Extension Manager dialog, as shown in Figure 5.7. In this case you can see that there is a warning to restart Visual Studio, which is required after installing any extension.
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Figure 5.7 Restart Visual Studio after installation
With the Silverlight SharePoint Web Part extension successfully installed you are ready to start creating Silverlight Web Parts. Let's look at the two different types of Silverlight Web Parts that you can create with the extension—Silverlight Web Parts and Custom Silverlight Web Parts.