Few Major Benefits of Silverlight Application Development and Best Coding Practices

Silverlight is one of Microsoft’s tools that help in creating rich and interactive media and business applications for desktop, web and mobile platforms. It integrates multimedia, graphics, animations and interactivity into a single runtime environment to give a engaging experience to the users and holding them for a longer period of time through its features. It was initially introduced as a plug-in for video streaming and then with newer and advanced versions it brought various interactivity features and CLI language support for Silverlight Application Development.

There are a lot of benefits that Silverlight Application Development provides its users and some of them are listed below:

• Cross-Platform, Cross-Browser: Silverlight application development helps you in working with any browser, as it is compatible with all
• Independent Development and Design: it gives the developers and designers the freedom to work independently on their own area and concentrate on it for better results
• Support for 3rd Party Languages: Silverlight application development gives the freedom to use third party languages like Ruby, Python, and EcmaScript etc and develop a rich application
• Cross-Platform, Cross-Browser Remote Debugging: Debugging is not a problem with Silverlight. You have access to features like setting breakpoints, step into/over code, have immediate windows etc from Visual Studios.
• The Best Video Experience: As Silverlight was first introduced as a video streaming plug-in it gives one of the best video output all in a highly graphical websites
• The Cost: It is one of the most affordable and inexpensive tools for video streaming integration with the best possible quality
• Total Control: Silverlight application development will now give total control to the content providers over their media content with television streaming and broadcast channels etc.

Although, Silverlight application development provides these many benefits but unless the development is done properly you wont get the desired results. So here are few best practices that you should keep in mind while you go coding:

• Avoid using excess ‘xmlns’ namespaces in XAML files that overburdens the page and loads slowly
• Make sure you don’t use the same namespace in a single XAML page multiple times
• Avoid using ‘local’ as your ‘xmlns’ namespace prefix. You can instead use ‘localControls’ or ‘localConverters’ for better meaning
• Do not use any unnecessary resource keys as they increase the memory use
• Do not use extra and unwanted panels unless necessary
• To hide the content use Visibility property of the control instead of the Opacity property. This helps in saving up the memory
• Use proper formatting of your XAML code

So keep all these things in mind while you code and your Silverlight application development work will delight you and your users with rich content and enticing graphics. And if you feel there are still things, which you don’t understand, and it will be better to take help of a professional then hire a Microsoft Silverlight application developer.