Announcements

I'm pleased and proud to say that my first Sparkling Client interview is now available for download; and this gives me the opportunity to recommend subscribing to this excellent new podcast.

Sparkling Client focuses exclusively on Silverlight and related technologies. The first couple broadcasts show some growing pains, but the later interviews are excellent (check out the interview with Adam Kinney!)

We released a minor maintenance update to Silverlight 1.0 over the weekend (internally known as GDR3, where GDR stands for "General Distribution Release"). I'm sure most readers of this blog already have Silverlight 2 Beta 1 installed on their own machines, but if you're building a site for the tens of millions of users that already have Silverlight installed on their machine, you'll be pleased to know that we're continuing to service the 1.0 release to take account of customer-reported issues.

We recently revamped the website for the Visual Studio Express Editions and made it Silverlight enabled. 

The approach was to add Silverlight without making it look like we just dropped something new into our existing site without any thought.  I loved how the site turned out and decided that it would make an interesting case study for people out there who are thinking about taking their own website and giving it a new life with Silverlight.

According to the team, taking a static html site and making it into a Silverlight site was a fun process.  We had two people work on it, a developer responsible for writing the XAML and JavaScript and a graphic designer.

John Lam just announced that the Dynamic Silverlight bits are now available.  What that does is enable you to write code targeting Silverlight in Ruby (IronRuby) or Python (IronPython).

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Yesterday evening I have played with the new Silverlight 2 beta 1 bits and tried to run it on different Web browsers. The system requirements for Silverlight 2 are:

* Silverlight 1.0 Only ;  ** Silverlight 2.0 Only

Well, there is no Yes with one or two stars for Apple Safari for Windows, but I did the test and it is working.

I wanted to remind my readers that I am teaching my first Silverlight 2 workshop in Dallas, TX on March 17th-19th so register now if you want to attend.  The new workshop covers Silverlight 2 so if you want to get up and running with the new technology, please join me in Dallas!

If you have any questions about the course, please feel free to contact me!

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One of the bigger announcements at MIX this year is Silverlight for Mobile Devices.  I had heard it was coming, but I wasn't able to spend any time looking into it before the conference.  So once I saw that there was a new session announced called "Mobile Devices and Microsoft Silverlight: A Primer on the New Technology" (we need permalinks for each session) I made sure to make my way to Delfino 4003 to attend.

Amit Chopra and David Kline presented an overview of the product roadmap as well as some application design guidelines.

As ScottGu announced in the Mix08 keynote today, we now have a full, rich set of controls built in to Silverlight 2. 

Kathy Kam recently created a very cool control viewer to show off all the great built in controls.  

Oh, and don't forget about the really rich set of controls produced by our echo-system.  Just a couple of examples:

• http://labs.componentone.com/Sapphire/?demo=controls
• http://www.vectorlight.net/silverlight_net_form_controls_demo.aspx
• http://www.infragistics.com/hot/silverlight.aspx