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David Crow

Connector of dots. Maker of lines. Rider of slopes.

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Silverlight Resources

by davidcrow

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

Posted on August 1, 2007 Filed Under: Articles

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