What is Silverlight Tool Kit?

There is no hard and fast rule to start Silverlight application. Every developer can start as per his/her experience.
like as per my case I always prefer Visual Studio. SO, in my view Visual Studio is the best place to start with Silverlight2 applications.Microsoft provides
templates for creating Silverlight applications and libraries in C#
and Visual Basic. (More...)

You can find a fully described article from http://www.silverlightclub.com/resources/1858-silverlight-lets-start-building-applications.aspx.aspx
In the following step(s) I am giving the ideas all about:
1.Create a project:Here you just start your visual studio, Select your programming language [C#/VB], Choose Silverligh Template give the name and save it
2. Adding SIlverlight COntrols:One thing is happened here, controls cannot dragged onto the designer, you can draw/drag the controls on XAML page.
(a) Naming to control:In this step just give the name to your silverligt control like for Button you can give name as : btnmySilverligtButton
(b)Adding event handlers to Silverlight controls:Here you can give the event handlers like for click etc.
(c)Testing Silverlight applications in Visual Studio:Now just press F5 and test your application (More...)

When you run the Silverlight application within Visual Studio, a new folder created in the web-site project for silverlight solution and it happened only first time. The folder name is ClientBin and having package with XAP extension which contains compiled project. (More...)

As I am from .Net background so in my views you can get C# / Vb.net compiled code but in Flash there is only action script.
You can find difference in depth at : http://silverlight.net/forums/t/3015.aspx (More...)

Yes, you can have multiple .xaml files in a single project.

In the App.xaml, in the method Application_Startup you can choose, which page you want to

initially display. (More...)

Silverlight uses a particular implementation of a XAML parser, with that parser being part of the Silverlight core install. In some cases, the parsing behavior differs from the parsing behavior in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), which also has a particular implementation (More...)

Storyboard is a Silverlight class with controls animations with a timeline, and provides object and property targeting information for its child animations (More...)

Nothing, Silverlight 2 is a full superset of Silverlight 1.0 - it is 100% compatible with Silverlight 1.0 applications and provides significantly more powerful features and functionality. Silverlight 1.0 applications even benefit from improvements in media playback and performance characteristics of Silverlight 2 with no additional work. (More...)

Silverlight will support all major browsers on both Mac OS X and on Windows. Particular care is being taken to account for differences in platform and browser capabilities to ensure a consistent experience including experiences on Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer. Microsoft will extend the support for Silverlight on Linux through a partnership with Novell. (More...)

The .xap mime type is: application/x-silverlight (More...)

The AppManifest.xaml file contains the deployment details needed to run the silverlight application.

Basic example:

(More...)

A basic xap file in silverlight will have an assembly related to specific code for the application, an application manifest file and any additional assemblies need to run the application. At a minimum, two files are needed, the application manifest file and the application assembly.

For example:

AppManifest.xaml

MyPianoV2.dll (More...)

A .xap file is used to contain and transfer the assemblies and resources of a managed code application. This managed code application must be run within the Silverlight 2 browser plug-in. (More...)

Once you have created the .xap file (explained below), the Silverlight 2 or 3 plug-in downloads the file and runs it in a separate work space. (More...)