Some of the images in the Silverlight 2 Tutorials are not what you or I would hope for. There is no excuse, but there is an explanation and a work around, and a fix going forward.
The explanation
It was very important to me to use the latest possible build on every screen shot and all the code to reduce potential confusion. Thus the tutorials were finalized at the last possible moment. We chose (wrongly in retrospect) to circulate the drafts, as Word docs, and then convert both to pdf and to html. Large images did not convert well. That is entirely my fault; I should have anticipated the problem (though they did much better in the pdf files).
The work-around
Let me start by noting that while writing this I looked through the tutorials to find examples and discovered that almost all the images look great! Unfortunately, one that looks terrible is one of the first images in Tutorial 1: Controls: the image of the new project window. Not a great first impression. The only good work around is the pdf file in which that image is a good bit clearer
The solution moving forward
Future tutorials will almost certainly be created in HTML, and in any case, I now have guidelines on size for images that will ensure that they can be set into our service with maximum clarity.
Thanks for your understanding