This post of Peter Kuhn is nor only about the BookShelf code sample, but also contains general information about shader effects in Silverlight and their performance implications, as well as some weird behaviors of the Silverlight runtime regarding those effects.
Source: Mister Goodcat
On 2010's PDC John Papa held a session named "Kung Fu Silverlight" to show some concepts of MVVM and RIA Services. The associated source code can be downloaded here. I've often used this code as a reference for people who were looking for a nice MVVM sample. Even if it's not fully polished to the last detail, it's an excellent start to learn about the involved patterns and practices. Yesterday, when I wanted to use the sample to demonstrate something, it required me to log in. And when I did that, my browser basically crashed. Well, actually it only hung, but it didn't come back to life, so I had to kill the process. I knew the sample had some performance issues due to a certain visual effect that results in problems, but it never happened before that my browser simply stopped working, so I decided to finally explore the problem in more detail and fix it.