The Great Asynchronous Learning Experiment - Day 2
Returned to Silverlight.net and downloaded all the tools. Went to the documentation and struggled on-line for a while, but the documentation I really wanted was in the help files; specifically the overviews. Wonderful news: the help files come with the SDK and you can read or print them locally. Great way to get started!
I printed out Introduction to SL 1.0 RC, SL 1.0 RC Architecture Overview and the complete Overviews section. Yow! lots of paper, but a great way to get started.
After reading for a while, returned to Silverlight.net and this time clicked on the Learn link. Then clicked on Videos. What could make it easier than being shown step by step, complete with code? Besides, I hear the “How Do I” videos Joe Stagner created for ASP.Net and AJAX are incredibly popular.
Skipped over the Mix videos (I was there, and besides, that was Beta) and went right for the 1.0 videos. Hmmm... better start at the beginning with Video #1…
NB: The light print in these articles is the “novice .NET programmer learning Silverlight.” The bold print, however, is the other side of my brain, which happens to know that the set of videos posted so far is not the complete set of videos we intend to post, and that there are “holes” in the curriculum that we’ll be filling in, in coming weeks.
I note that the very first video assumes that I have installed my development environment and, uh oh, that I know about animation and about creating gradients, and that I have Expression Blend installed (or at least know what it is). Clearly video #1 is not the first video to watch. Hmmm...
Right! We will be adding videos before what is now video #1 that will introduce more fundamental topics. In fact, we really need to reorder what is already on the site so that a user can go through them left to right, top to bottom and learn in an ordered way. Time to write a memo….