It was great to be part of the VS2008 at the Movies event this morning. Thanks to all of you who braved a quintessentially Canadian snowstorm to be there!

My favourite part of the WPF/Silverlight presentation was being able to show some of the work we’ve been doing with WPF and .NET 3.5 at Thermo Fisher Scientific. Their WPF-based Topology Editor is an excellent example of how WPF can add business value by enabling a more insightful visualization of an inherently complex system. (In this case, it’s the topology of a robotics lab!)  Dave Lloyd has a cool video of the Thermo robots in action on his blog and, beyond that, I’ll save more discussion about the Topology Editor for another day.

Here are the follow-up links that I promised.

Slide Deck
First of all, here is my ObjectSharp VS2008 At the Movies: WPF 3.5/Silverlight slide deck. There are a couple of slides in this deck that I left out of today’s presentation as we were running short of time.

Getting started with WPF/Silverlight:
Here are the places to start:

WPF: http://www.windowsclient.net
Silverlight: http://www.silverlight.net
Mix08, Las Vegas, where you’ll learn heaps more about both: http://www.visitmix.com/2008

I focused on WPF 3.5 during the presentation because really exciting Silverlight announcements pertaining to the 2.0 beta are coming at Mix08 next month. To that end, here are links to more information about some of the improvements in WPF 3.5 that I demoed:

More on data validation improvements in WPF 3.5:
http://blogs.msdn.com/wpfsdk/archive/2007/10/02/data-validation-in-3-5.aspx
(The WPF SDK team posts many useful articles on that blog – worth subscribing and having a look back through if you’re getting into WPF/Silverlight)

More on debugging WPF bindings:

http://www.beacosta.com/blog/?p=52

(Bea has a great WPF blog and it’s my go-to reference for databinding information and samples.)

More in general about what’s new in WPF 3.5:
Kevin Moore and Tim Sneath dig into what’s new in WPF 3.5 on Channel 9.
Tim Sneath summarizes 15 cool new WPF 3.5 features.

More about what’s coming for Silverlight at Mix08:
Scott Guthrie gives a great 2-part interview for Channel 9. Part 1, Part 2.