Silverlight is Microsoft's new cross-browser plug-in for delivering richer web experiences to end-users, including video and animations. Silverlight is generating buzz not only inside the traditional Microsoft developer community, but also among designers and web developers who have long relied on other tools such as Macromedia Flash to get their jobs done.

Though Silverlight is still in beta, there's no need to wait. In this Short Cut, Siverlight-insider and Microsoft MVP Shawn Wildermuth introduces you to Silverlight's key features and shows you how to tap into its functionality to spice up your HTML and ASP.NET pages.

You'll begin with the "Why" and "What" of Silverlight," but quickly move on to learn the basics of Silverlight XAML, the mark-up language you'll use to deliver Silverlight content to your web pages. You'll learn about the Silverlight layout model, namespaces, animations and more. You'll see how to host Silverlight on an HTML page, how to handle events and errors, and how to manipulate Silverlight XAML dynamically with JavaScript. You'll learn how to work with prerecorded audio and video as well as streaming media, and how to integrate Silverlight with an ASP.NET project. Finally, you'll get suggestions on where to look for tools, examples and additional documentation.

In short, if you're ready to test-drive Silverlight today, this Short Cut is the perfect tutorial for experienced web developers, and it comes in a single package that's concise, coherent and loaded with sample code.