I’m about to start building my first Silverlight project. Qixing and I have started compiling a list of publicly available Silverlight materials. I have a couple of hurdles get over in building this application. I find the Microsoft deployment environments significantly different than my traditional Unix background. My guess is that I’m probably building a Silverlight 1.1 alpha application just because I’m going to want to consume a set of web services. More to come.
What is possible with Silverlight and Expression?
- Top Banana online video browsing, sorting, and editing tool.
- Silverlight Airlines visually mapping out your flight route.
- Silverlight Showcase includes examples from NETFLIX, BBC, CBC, and more.
- Microsoft Popfly is a easy way to build and share mashups and web pages. Here’s a video of Popfly in action.
- Major League Baseball (MLB) will go live early August, video at Mix07
- Netflix demo from Mix07 by Neil Hunt of Netflix and Darin Brown of Avenue A/Razorfish
- MIX website Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie's keynote is highly recommended and introduces next web
What do users need?
- Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 Release Candidate – Mac or Windows
- Microsoft Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh – Mac or Windows
What does my team need?
Designer Tools
- Microsoft Expression Studio
- Expression Blend 2 – (download the most recent preview version)– Design tool to create user interaction for Silverlight
- Expression Design – Vector-based illustration and design tool
- Expression Media – digital asset management tool
- Expression Media Encoder Preview – Allows users to create and enhance Silverlight enabled videos
Developer Tools
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2
- Visual Studio Extensions for Silverlight
What training and resources are available?
Training
- A lot of training materials are available at the Expression product site.
- Lynda.com training
- Getting Started with Expression Blend by Lee Brimelow
- Getting Started with Expression Design by Ted LoCascio
- Expression Web Essential Training with Joe Marini
- Expression Blend Beta Preview with Lee Brimelow
- Nibble Tutorials – Snack-sized tutorials on building RIA using Silverlight and Blend
- Silverlight Screencasts by Tim Sneath’s Team each video is about 5 mins long on a particular topic of using Silverlight.
- How-Do-I Video Series Expression videos, WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) videos.
- 32 Video presentations from Mix 2007
Silverlight Resources
- Microsoft Silverlight Homepage
- Microsoft Silverlight Developers Center
- Silverlight.net a more community-oriented site than the link above, which includes a lot of Silverlight showcases built by Microsoft partners and community enthusiasts.
- Silverlight 1.0 Beta QuickStart a quick guide of different parts you’ll need to create a Silverlight application.
- Silverlight 1.1 Alpha QuickStart
Related Microsoft Tools
- Microsoft Design a central place to communicate about Microsoft's design culture, mission, experiences, people, and much more.
- WindowsClient.net a new community site for WPF and Windows Forms, which provides a common place for the community to understand a unified .NET/Windows client offering.
- WPF Hands-on Labs including “Using Data Binding in WPF,” Creating Rich 2D and 3D content in WPF,” and much more.
Blogs
- Canadian User Experience Blog updated frequently with Canadian news and events focusing on the design community, and resources.
- Expression Team Blog provides updated Expression product news, links to samples and tutorials. There are links to individual team member's blogs on the site as well.
- Tim Sneath’s blog is great at aggregating examples that best showcase the technologies.
- David Anson’s Silverlight blog
