Why Silverlight Part 2

We will try to understand the relationship between web browser,Web Server and Silverlight.
1. Web Browser
2. Web Server
and HTTP Protocol.

This post is dedicated to these.

1. Web Browser
Web browser is nothing but an application residing on Operating system which will render the HTML.
Rendering means that it will know how to present the html Tags. It’s very important to know about working of web browser and most of the content here will talk about web browser and web server.

I will explain with one example.
When you type http://www.dhaneel.com you see my blog but what is happening behind is what i am going to explain.

What web browser does the same thing we are going to do it with telnet command.

1. When u type http://www.dhaneel.com -> what is happening is it’s connecting to web server on remote host and giving me the page back.
Please note that web browser by default connects to port no 80.

Now open command prompt . You can do that by going to Start -> Run
And type the following

telnet www.dhaneeel.com 80

[ Note : Telnet Comes along with windows.It’s a program which can be used to connect to any machine on any port. Like you want to connect to SMTP server of Google. Then use this command.

telnet smtp.gmail.com 25 ]

Figure 1.0 shows usage of telnet to connect to webserver [ Port 80 – Default ].

Once you connected to the webserver then you need to talk to webserver in a language in which it can understand and those are called protocols. Webserver supports mainly two protocol.

1. GET
2. POST

Get
Get protocol is generally used to request for a page and POST protocol is used to post the data to the webserver. We will discuss on GET protocol.

What webserver expects is a string named GET and followed by the page it want to fetch.

GET “page url”

So after connecting to webserver you need to enter the following thing.

GET http://www.dhaneel.com/msbuild-for-silverlight/

And maily press Enter twice. That’s how the protocol is designed. That’s it now you will the HTML code coming back from the server.

If you save this all data in a file with .html extension and open it in browser.You will see the same content which you will see when you visit

http://www.dhaneel.com/msbuild-for-silverlight/

The entire html which is coming up to the client side as a DOM document. Which needs to be replaced each time a new request goes to the server. Let me give one example. Suppose you want to delete one mail in your inbox. Then 1 new request will be sending it to the server and then entire response html without that deleted mail should come back. Then we need to refresh the entire screen.

Then the new concept was added and that was AJAX. ( Asynchronous JavaScript + XML). You can read more on it here. This gave us the feature for modifying the DOM which was available at the Browser. So each time when you delete a mail. Asynchronous request goes to server and return back with a flag and based on that we change the DOM. This new feature which was implemented in the DOM was called Inner HTML property. This allowed us to make use of AJAX kind of calls.

Hope now we are clear with Web Browser and Web Server. Let’s move ahead and find out how silverlight is working.

For silverlight Microsoft has developed a Plug-In which can be called as Light .NET CLR. Which can be installed on the browser (Currently it can be installed on IE,Firefox,Chrome).Plug-in is nothing but a stripped of version of the FAT .NET CLR.
You can use this to program in C#. You can make use of almost all basic data types which are present in .NET CLR.

It explains about the need of Silverlight. Explains the basic things which are required to understand the working of silverlight. Beginners must start with this article.

MSBUILD for Silverlight

I wanted to setup a continuous integration environment for Silverlight.Some links which helped me in doing the same.
Cruise Control - To trigger the MSBUILD and it has loads of reporting feature.
Cruise Control
If you are new to MSBUILD then this will help you to understand on MSBUILD.
MSBUILD

and for Building a Silverlight application with MSBuild
Building a Silverlight application with MSBuild

and few tricks which will help us to setup Silverlight Build on machine where SDK are not installed.
MSBUILD Tricks

Hope this will help..