I had a chance to attend the recent Atlanta stop of Wildermuth Consulting’s Silverlight Tour this past week and wanted to offer some quick comments about it here for anyone considering the class.
Going into the class, I had about 3 weeks of heads-down knowledge of Silverlight 1.0, but I had spent no time at all with Silverlight 1.1 (now 2.0). I had also read Silverlight 1.0 Unleashed, watched a lot of the webcasts available and I had just (mostly) completed my first Silverlight 1.0 project.
The 3-day Silverlight Tour begins with Day 1 of mostly concepts and terminology and an introduction into the Expression Suite. This was mostly review for me, but I still managed several “a-ha” moments during the day as the presenter, Shawn Wildermuth, explained the “why” behind a lot of the concepts and decisions that were made in regards to Silverlight. It was a good “shoring up” of my skills in the foundations of Silverlight.
Day 2 was all about the code. We spent about ½ the day on Silverlight 1.0 and the other ½ on Silverlight 1.1. We had several labs, lecture, and discussion throughout the day. (A good mix of the three, in my opinion). One of the strengths of the class was that when questions would come up, we had the flexibility in the schedule to actually go off on short tangents and explore different ideas as a class. I walked away from this day with a much better understanding of how the code side of Silverlight works with the design side, as well as, a lot of anticipation for Silverlight 2.0.
Day 3 was the main reason I had taken the class and Shawn did not disappoint. One of the things I struggled most with while working through the Weather Widget was how to organize projects and where do I use this method from the AJAX assemblies and where do I use Silverlight, etc. These are the types of things that just aren’t in books yet, but Shawn has been there, done that and you are getting it first-hand. We learned about the integration points with ASP.NET Ajax and Silverlight, and even newer technologies such as ASP.NET Data Services and the Entity Framework. Further, we talked about packaging of Silverlight controls and other ways of thinking about the generation of XAML…ways I hadn’t thought about until then. Very cool stuff from someone that truly understands the subject matter and takes the time to explain things in such a way as to really help everyone “get it”.
So, I walk away with a head full of knowledge about all kinds of fun things that will be filling my life over the next year (and dying to tear my entire project for the Weather Widget apart and do it with all the new Best Practices I managed to acquire over the past 3 days)!