Today’s .Net User Group meeting was “It’s All About Silverlight“ was presented by Kelly Cliffe. It was all about Silverlight, and although Kelly mentioned it was his first public speaking since high school he gave a good talk.
The talk was 101 with meat, so maybe a 201 level with some stories from the battle field (~301 level tit bits).
At the end there were Mix 07 DVDs being handed out and I got Discs 1, 3, 7. So fueled up with Silverlight Cool-Aid I headed home to installed Orcas Beta 1 on my PC. The only thing missing from the DVD set was the “Microsoft Silverlight Tools Alpha for Visual Studio codename “Orcas” Beta 1“ and once that was all installed it just worked!
I had previously download a Digger(Boulderdash) Silverlight example that I found on Lutz Roeder’s site. It was a VS2005 project so I had fun coping it into a Orcas project and getting it working. Was quite useful seeing how the parts of the namespace/project/output names are used in the xaml etc (ie this was where my pain points were). Of note is that my version only runs in IE yet Lutz’s current Digger runs fine in FireFox.
So now I have some working code, I need to think what I want to build. I’m not sure but it’s a heck of a lot more accessible than Flash has appeared to be. That might be the tipping point.