Resources

Most of the people reading this will already know this invormation, I hope. For ones recently being converted to Silverlight, I'm thinking I may push out a post like this irregularly.

There are lots of ways to stay connected with the world of Silverlight. The most obvious is Silverlight.net -- this is the source for the control, the SDK, etc. plus how-to videos and tons of resources. The forums there are unbelievabley busy with folks asking and answering questions. I'm not sure when some of those guys either work or sleep because they seem to ALWAYS be there :)

It seems like every day I find, or am shown, another blogger doing Silverlight...

The past 3 days, I've been working on my article on using Silverlight with all kinds of data and services. This is in fact like a transcript of the session I did at Mix Essentials in Belgium last week, but now in tutorial-format.

First, I take you through building services that are ready to be consumed by Silverlight clients using WCF. Then, we take a look at 3 types of services your Silverlight application can connect with: self-describing (using WSDL, meta-data driven), non-self-describing services (REST APIs like Flickr...) and finally RSS.

I hope this article really helps you in finding your way in Silverlight.

I posted the article on my "article-blog", www.CodeFlakes.net. The link is the following: http://www.codeflakes.net/blog/post/Silverlight2c-Data-and-Services-The-complete-story.aspx

Deep Zoom which is a technology that combines Silverlight with SeaDragon is a powerful and easy way to impliment zooming and panning large images. Below are a few examples.

• Exploration of Very Large or High Resolution Images with Great Performance: Take a huge high resolution image or collection of images (e.g. a map or collection of high-res pics) and allow users to zoom WAY in and pan around the image(s). If you haven't checked out the Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia site have a look.

On my never ending quest in Silverlight, I came across some very interesting links. Here are some that I really wanted to share with my readers....

• RSS databinding explained: Using the Syndication classes in Silverlight, it's easy to parse RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 feeds. In this article, the author explains how you can do some more advanced databinding scenario's with these classes.
• Code Camp Site Template: this actually contains a starter kit for an entire web app. Cool and extensible!
• KAXAML now supports Silverlight!

The Microsoft Switzerland DPE Team yesterday ran an all-day hands-on lab on the subject of Silverlight 2 Beta 1 in Zürich. This blog post's purpose in life is to share the lab with you in case you want to try it for yourself to quickly get started with Silverlight 2.

Goal of the lab was to build a full featured Silverlight application from scratch that acts as a rich, interactive data-driven car-finder application, based on the Comparis Silverlight Challenge sample solution. This challenge runs until June 22, 2008 and will award the best Silverlight solution that implement new and creative ways to use a RIA to visualize automobile advertisements.

As promised here are the slides and demo's from my talks at the Atlanta Code Camp yesterday. It was a great time and I got to see a lot of attendees and speakers who I haven't seen in a while. 

My big embarrassment moment was at the speaker's dinner when I saw David Silverlight and completely forgot who he was (i've met him a number of times).  When I heard he'd just flown in from Florida, I asked him, "Did you fly in with David Silverlight?".  He promptly replied, "In a sense, yes..."  I was so red faced.

The webcast recording is now online. To view the recording, register for the livemeeting and then click the view online or download links.

Enjoy!

At Mix08, the Silverlight 2 Poster was a hot item given out in many of the session.   If you didn't get yours or if you couldn't make it, you can feel free to download and print your own!

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Also, note that Joe did a very cool DeepZoom version.