CodeCamp Toronto: Silverlight Beyond MIX09

Silverlight Beyond Mix09 By Active Application

Thanks to everyone who came out to Toronto CodeCamp on Saturday to talk about Silverlight Beyond Mix09.

As per the chart, my presentation was Powerpoint-free, but code+markup heavy. Actually markup heavy, really.

There wasn’t a lot of Blend coming that afternoon, and MIX09 for me was about embracing design and seeking “return on experience,” which are the reasons you probably care about Silverlight in the first place.

So I thought I would tee up the day’s Silverlight tracks by spending more time in Blend, with its “split” mode activated, so you could see both its visual surface and the XAML markup (now with AutoComplete!).

Links and Resource Hubs

Getting started: Please see the silverlight.net site. Silverlight 2 and 3 dev can be made to co-exist on the same VS2008 box via Amy’s very useful batch file trick. Designers see these getting started resources.

Follow the new stuff: Save yourself the trouble and just subscribe to WynApse’s Silverlight Cream – Dave aggregates all the Silverlight news of the day and adds his thoughtful, passionate commentary.

Hubs for Links: Please see Tim Heuer for an all-up look at what’s new in Silverlight 3, and BradA for .NET RIA Services (many link roundups).

Good summaries of individual features: What’s new in Blend 3, Pixel Shaders, Style Enhancements, Out-of-Browser, GPU Acceleration, Local Connections, Dialog Windows, Writeable Bitmaps.

This list is far from exhaustive – there are excellent Silverlight 3 link hubs like Tim’s out there and I hope this gets you started. Please drop me a note if I’ve missed a subtopic.

Sample Code

Here it is. Where I started from someone else’s sample, I include a .URL link back to the source.

Grease-What?

Sorry, the Legend of the Greasepole code (which I used to demo hardware acceleration and Silverlight Offline) isn’t in there. For more wacky inexplicable greasepole-climbing hilarity, you can play the Silverlight 2 version here, and learn more here and more about its move from XNA to Silverlight here. Yes, us Queens Applied Science types are a strange bunch.

Thank You

Thanks again to the organizers of CodeCamp, and particularly Chris Dufour and the many volunteers, for all your efforts. And thank you to the attendees: It was an early morning in late April, with a Toronto afternoon approaching that ended up flirting with 30 degrees Celsius. CodeCamp is a fun and energetic day, and I look forward to next year’s gig already.