Back from the Silverlight Tour

Rik Robinson — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 03:49:55 GMT

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)!

My First Look at the (Silver)Light

Rik Robinson — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 05:25:20 GMT

Over the holidays, I was finally able to catch up on some reading and take some time to play with Silverlight 1.0. The two books that I spent the most time with are ASP.NET Ajax in Action and Silverlight 1.0 Unleashed. Both of these, I HIGHLY recommend! >

My first project is a Silverlight 1.0 application that I call Weather Widget (for lack of a more exciting moniker). The Weather Widget will accept a 5-digit US Zip Code and return a 5-day forecast from The Weather Channel. You can see it in action here: >Weather Widget. (Note: This will require the Silverlight 1.0 plug-in). >

I also took the time in this project to use (experiment) with a lot of new toys such as:

· LINQ to XML (and the XDocument/XElement classes)

· New C# language enhancements including Automatic Properties, Object Initializers, Implicitly typed variables, etc.

· Javascript key events – some hard-learned (and forgotten and now painfully re-learned) lessons to share here

· Integration of ASP.NET Ajax and Silverlight – my implementation here is rudimentary right now as I’m still sorting through the most efficient blending of these two technologies

· Integration of DOM Elements with Silverlight (good post from Keith on that topic here)>

· Expression Studio (mostly Blend) - I have much to say about this (some of which you can read in this discussion in Shawn’s comments here). Overall, I really like a lot of things about Blend. I am finding myself there more these days though I miss a lot of things about working in Macromedia (now Adobe) Fireworks (which I have used for MANY years for all of my design work). One upcoming post I’m working on here is “Top 10 Things I miss from Fireworks while working in Blend”. >

· Using JSON – I had never used it so now I have

Guess that about covers it. I’ll link back to the above points as I blog about each.

I have several things I’m planning to add (and am open to suggestions), but wanted to get it out there in its current state. Once I am happy with it, I’ll post it to the gallery on the Silverlight.net site. >

Let me know if the Widget blows up…at this point, I’ve tested only on IE7 and Firefox on my laptop (Windows Vista64).

r2 musings - rants, raves, and research (mostly on .NET topics) from rik robinson - ASP.NET Ajax

Back from the Silverlight Tour

My First Look at the (Silver)Light