Jesse Liberty - Silverlight Geek

Taking the market for granted - Not

Sometimes when I'm writing a reply to a comment, I realize it deserves a new blog post. Here you go....

>>  I think that you're being optimistic in thinking that Silverlight is an automatic choice, even with SL 2.0. <<

Sorry, I was unclear. I meant it was an automatic choice for me. That is, for my values, for my work, with my history and needs, it is a no-brainer: and would be if I didn't work  for Microsoft. In fact, it was, before I worked for Microsoft. After I saw Silverlight at Mix 07, I went home and within a week registered Silverlight Consulting LLC.

That was my plan until I was offered the only better job in the world, the one I have now.

The point is that Silverlight fits in with my existing skills, builds on the technology I know, uses the tools I like, comes from a company I trust to get it right.  So for me it was a no-brainer.

What I was trying to say is that I'm not good at (as you can see) selling it to anyone else. I see my job as coming mostly post-sales; helping those who want to learn or use Silverlight to get the most out of the experience, and helping to make sure that Silverlight.net is the place they turn to for whatever they need.

I did not mean to suggest that the decision to use Silverlight is a given for everyone else. As always, there are some for whom it actually is a given,  and there are some for whom the rule may well be "anyone but Microsoft" -- for most an evaluation will be made based on their needs and the technology, though I reject the idea that lots of people come to a technology like this as babes in the woods, open to any technology solely based on its merits,  as if they have no previous investments in learning, acquired skills, legacy technology, etc.

How big each group is, is outside my area of expertise. Put a gun to my head and make me guess? My gut says the world will look something like the following by end of 2009:

Silverlight adopted with no alternative seriously considered: 20%.

Not Silverlight, no matter what we do: 10%

Explore Silverlight but decide on a competitor: 5%

Explore Silverlight and its competition and choose Silverlight: 40%

Decide to stay out of this space for now:  20%.

Fell out of the statistical map, and never heard from again: 5%

**** THIS IS NOT A MICROSOFT PREDICTION OPINION OR EVEN SPECULATION *** This is straight from my own 2 decades of being wrong every time I predict anything to you. And note that, carefully, I have worked hard to develop a fairly reliable record of being dead wrong.  ("what is this Mac toy?  "I prefer 1-2-3" "Personally, I like the dot prompt")

This is why my retirement is in indexed funds.

-j

The difference between a geek and a snob

                                     

In my recent post I tried to distinguish between my (mis?)understanding of the role of an Evangelist (helping folks figure out if they want to commit to Silverlight) vs my role  as I see it (helping developers lean and use Silverlight).  It is hard enough defining ones own role, let alone the role of others.

My Evangelist friends define their role differently, more inclusively as people who are passionate about the technology they work with.  In that sense, my post reeked with condescension ("you guys are just in sales, I'm a developer).  It is the Dilbert attitude towards marketing (at times  deserved, but certainly not applicable in this case). So, live and learn. The interesting thing is, none of them complained; they are too busy getting their work done.

Some other ideas: Evangelist  Evangelist  Evangelist

All of which is to say, there are a lot of folks here at Microsoft who are spinning in circles getting ready to talk with you about Silverlight 2; eager to show off what we have, and hoping that you will be as enthusiastic as we are.

Much more to come soon..

 - Captian Silverlight

My Commitment To Support Silverlight 2 Developers

Silverlight 2 is big. Very big. It's great, but it is very big,  with many cool features.

So we're preparing. And all that preparation means that there will be a lot of information,  and  many paths through that information.  My goal is to ensure that  Silverlight.net always has more than enough information to be the one-stop home for the community of Silverlight developers. 

As a step in that direction,  I'd like to tell you a little about my own plans for providing an integrated set of materials to make learning  Silverlight 2 easier. 

The Plan

My plan, subject to  management intervention ("stop that and get back to sharpening pencils"), your feedback ("you call that a tutorial?"), or unexpected acts of the Gods ("oh look,  locusts")  is this:

The day we release Silverlight 2,  I will post a number of on-line tutorials  here on Silverlight.net with links through my blog.  These  tutorials will be targeted at .NET developers,  but I will not assume the reader has experience in Silverlight or WPF .

Each tutorial will be filled with illustrations and working examples (that you can download separately), and each will run about 4,000 - 5,000 words (the equivalent of about 20 pages), or more as needed.

The goal is for the Silverlight 2 tutorials to  compliment rather than replace or repeat the Silverlight 2 documentation. The tutorials are targeted at working developers who prefer more explanation rather than less, but my assumption is a high level of professional expertise; these are not for hobbyists; and they are not fluff.

  Along with these tutorials I will also post the first of my new How Do I video series on programming Silverlight 2. This new series will be a compliment to the tutorials; not repeating the material; but demonstrating concepts through developing examples in screen-capture videos, and adding a new level of post-production enhancement to increase their value.

After we release, I'll personally commit to at least the following every month...

• Two tutorials, each covering a Silverlight 2 topic in detail, starting with the most compelling topics 
• 6 How Do I videos
• A Deep Dive Webcast
• 20 Tips of the Day
• Numerous blog entries on Silverlight 2 news, events, and more

Also, Tim Heuer and I have committed to writing  Programming Silverlight, to be published by O'Reilly Media this year.

I certainly will not be the only person producing material on Silverlight 2 (far from it) but I hope to create a useful set of multi-media material, and to do so in a very predictable pattern that you will be able to rely on. 

In addition, I'll be taking the opportunity to go to events to present on Silverlight development; which will give me a chance to talk with and listen to the developer community directly.

 
In  the meantime, Scott Guthrie, our new Vice President (congratulations Scott!) , has released a sneak peek of Silverlight 2 that you don't want to miss, complete with his own 8-part tutorial !

The Difference Between An Evangelist and A Geek

Today's NY Times declares (ever so quietly) the beginning of the Netware wars (did I just coin that term?). They get a lot wrong in the article, but if you know more than they appear to, you can conclude that Silverlight and Air/Flex will be competing for the hearts and minds of the same developers. For some developers, that is certainly true.

Moreover, many will be facing a strategic choice in coming months (we've seen this movie: DOS vs. CP/M, Windows Vs. Unix vs. OS2, and on and on). This is a choice that the Evangelists at Microsoft are well equipped to help you make (as, I suspect, are the evangelists at Adobe and at IWannaPlayToo, Inc.) But even though I was shocked and dismayed to see that Microsoft's computerized career planner has me on their Evangelism track I am not an Evangelist. Never was, don't think I will be.

I spent the last 15 years of my life doing three things: developing applications, writing books and teaching. I was hired into the Development Division and I don't Evangelize (at least not on purpose). I'm actually pretty useless at telling you why Silverlight is a better choice because I take it as given and self-evident.

Worse (much much worse) I don't really care which you choose (gasp!) except in terms of keeping myself employed, selling books and for other entirely selfish reasons. Some of the people I respect and like most built one of the flagship AIR programs, and seemed to have a good time doing it, so I figure Flex can't be the Devil's work. But I have no desire to be a Flex programmer (and I secretly believe, though they have not said so, that if Silverlight 2 were available when they started, they would have used that; of course they would, at least some of them were already .NET programmers. But I speak for myself, not them. I certainly would have, that's for sure).

The bottom line is that I suspect that there is merit to both technologies, though I can't quite imagine why anyone would choose to develop in Flex now that Silverlight 2 is (almost) available, when Silverlight is part of a product line that runs from ASP.NET, through Ajax, to WPF and one that includes SQL Server and Visual Studio, all with one 800 number to call; as a developer I always preferred to have a single vendor so that they could never say 'oh the problem is that other guy's stuff isn't working' -- but truly I digress because that is just my preference. That is not a compelling argument. It's not an argument at all; it is a personal preference.

The point is that my work starts after you choose Silverlight. I'm happy to tell you why Silverlight floats my boat, and why I gave up 12 years as an independent contractor to come to work for the evil empire (oops) specifically to be the Silverlight Geek (the order of operations here, the cause and effect,  is important; I came to Microsoft for Silverlight, rather than I like Silverlight because I work for Microsoft).

My job (and my fun) is to help build a place that has whatever it takes for developers to learn and use Silverlight (please see my next posting on what I'll be doing once Silverlight 2 is here),  and to write cool Silverlight stuff, and to ensure that Silverlight.net is the single best resource for Silverlight developers on the Internet so that the people who hired me think "whoa! this guy offers something valuable to developers, let's pay him more," so that I can pay my kids' tuition (do you have any idea how much tuition is, and they promise, when you take early admission to make sure you can afford it, by which they mean, they'll look at your W2 and say "Yup, you can afford it.")

So, its okay with me that people call me an Evangelist, as long as they don't expect me to do much evangelizing. Here's what I know: about 10 years ago I received two emails in response to something I wrote about pointers (remember pointers?) in C++ (remember C++?). The first said something like "I've never understood this until you explained it. You made it so clear, I'm so grateful..."  The second said "I don't know what it is you actually do for a living but it isn't writing and it isn't programming because you obviously don't know how to do either."  I hung them both up.  Not much has changed.

Now I write about and program in Silverlight. I'm still not sure how to do either, but I'll be doing 'em right here.

Learning Silverlight 2 - More things you can do today.

if I were a bleeding edge Silverlight programmer who just cannot wait for release of Silverlight 2 and its documentation, here is what I'd do today:

• Read Scott Guthrie's blog post  "First Look at Silverlight 2
• Read Programming WPF (2nd ed) , especially these Chapters:  Layout, Input, Controls, Simple Data Binding, Styles, Control Templates, XAML

Programming WPF by Chris Sells, Ian Griffiths Read more about this title...

Another approach, which I think might be very profitable would be to recreate Scott's Digg application in WPF (or as much as you can). Little of what you learn will be wasted, and it is my personal suspicion that within a year (plus or minus six months) every Silverlight and WPF programmer will realize that they need to become proficient in both technologies (remember, Silverlight was originally called WPF/Everywhere).  That is not an official Microsoft position (in fact I just made it up) but now that I've said it, it makes enormous sense to me (see Scott's 8th tutorial).

A note on reading, technology and mental illness

I posted yesterday about Amazon's Media Library -- which I believe could be a great back end to a very cool Silverlight project and that led to a comment on the volume of my reading. I started to write a response but once you get me started talking about reading... well I thought I'd indulge in one more blog post during the gentle moments before Mix.

There have been a few amazing changes in technology that have significantly affected my reading (though I admit I was always a serious reader -- see note below on reading and mental illness.)

It started with Books. Remember books?  I bought 'em by the truck load, back when Barnes and Noble was a single store on 18th Street and if you wanted a book you got on the train and went and bought it.

Then came Books On Tape which was great: rentals I could listen to in the car (though I still felt compelled to buy printed versions to look at later).  I started listening to in the early 1990s . They went out of  the retails business just as I seriously got into The Teaching Company Lectures, which has gotten better and better over the years (Click here  and then on Lectures, for my recommendations).

But the big break through was Audible (the Platinum deal is great; I buy 4 a year)

In the past 2 years I've bought a few hundred books from Audible. I love Audible. Wish they gave green stamps. Digital is so very much better than tapes. Especially digital that remembers where you are in the book. Or books. Gotta' be able to read more than one at a time.

You really want more than one book with you at a time.

And who can remember where all the tapes are?

Audible is one thing, but what gave it enormous power was the iPod , er,  ah the Zune, yeah, the Zune.  

Here's a picture of my Zune. (See, it says Zune right on it)

Love my Zune. Got the 80 Gig. Ran out of room on my 8.

Sometimes you gotta' read.

Then there's print. Now, I still like reading, but books are heavy (and I fractured my shoulder in December, which quintupled the weight of every page. And remember, I have ADD, which means I like to be reading a few different books so I can switch off every ten minutes. Long flights require at least 3 books, usually more. And a couple magazines. Heavy. Also, I hate waiting for books to arrive from Amazon. Who can wait two days? That's crazy.

Thank God for the Kindle Here's my ungrateful review.  (Some people are never happy). 

Right now I have 7 books on the Kindle (including Bleak House, which is big) and three newspapers and 18 pdf files. And it remembers where I'm up to in each one. I love that.  I've used about 5% of its memory and all of my book budget.  The screen is wonderful and late in the day I can make the font bigger for my tired mddle-aged eyes.

Reading and Mental Illness

When I was a kid I had serious social skills problems (I'm sure you're shocked!) and, having no friends,  I used to read 7+ books a week through junior high. I still read quite a bit.  To tell you more than you want to know, I have an interesting combination of OCD and ADD, which means that I'll buy and  ~20 (or 100)  books on a subject before I get bored (the positive aspect of obsessive-compulsive disorder) but I need to be reading 5-7 different books at a time, switching among them (there's that ADD) and the Kindle makes that affordable and possible as I can have numerous books with me at any time. Wonderful.

I typically have 3 books (okay 7) on the iPod, half a dozen on the Kindle and another half dozen I'm in the middle of on paper.

That plus newspapers, blogs and magazines and I'm a happy guy.  

The device I really (really) want is one that lets me read (like the kindle) then switch to audio when I have to put it down, then switch back to reading. But that's asking a lot, so I'll give it a few more years.

There Ain't No Parity

We say, but we don't mean it, that mental illness is just like physical illness. Nothing to be ashamed of. But we're lying. We want to believe that. But we don't. .

 Few of us  hesitate to say "yes, I have high blood pressure" but we sure don't go around saying "I have OCD" even if the OCD is under control and the hypertension isn't.  Why is that? The result, by the way, is that the average time from onset of symptoms to beginning of treatment for OCD is 17 years (in my case, more like twice that). 

Microsoft is a wonderful company, with fantastic benefits, but like almost every company and state in the US, its Mental Health benefits are not quite the same as its physical health benefits. I get why, but they're still not.

Finally, we spend a lot of time saying things like "I don't want to take those medications, then I won't be me" but again I don't hear people saying that about Lipitor (for cholesterol) or their anti-hypertensive's. Turns out that the SSNRIs I take had just the opposite affect; they removed the overly anxious grump who was always getting me into trouble and let me alone. Might not be much, but its much quieter.

Okay, we now return this blog to your regularly scheduled technical obsessions.

[PS: The graphics on my blog have been too ugly lately. I'm working on it. May have it licked.]

Share Everything...

Clearly one thing that social networking is about is exploring the limits on what you want to share and what other people might be interested in. There is, I'm sure, at least one sociology paper (and two reports to the D.A.) in this theme...

Different social networking services have been more or less successful in getting folks to enter information about what they're listening to, reading, etc., but if there is one lesson after 20 years in this industry it is that people love to share, but they hate filling out forms more than 2 or three times. Ask most people who, unlike me do not have OCD, to fill in all the books they've read or all the music they've bought, and they get bored right quick.

Amazon, however, is in a unique position to let you share without doing nearly that much work. All you need do is to agree to sacrifice a bit of privacy and hey! presto! instant lists and lists and lists.

Now, with Amazon's Your Media Library I can start off with a list that Amazon keeps for me.

I can easily take a more visual view, which just cries out for a Silverlight front end, don't you think?

(NB: I've chopped these images down to help them fit)

Hmmm.... the potential is pretty powerful. Even if I don't use their front end, there may well be a way to hook into their list as a web service or... a Sliverlight application. 

It's way too late at night to figure this all out, but it is very intriguing, so I'm going to go dream about it and see what I can some up with.

Meanwhile, if you write anything interesting that creates a Silverlight front end to this service, be sure to let us know.

[NB: Sorry about the original images. Fixed now - Dope Slap!]

Tip of the Day - Suspends Until Mid March - Then Focus On Silverlight 2

Rather than trying to provide a Tip of the Day as we head towards one of the larger and more important  shows of the year (you are going to Mix, right?)

Therefore, I'm going to suspend the Tip of the Day from now until mid-March.

After Mix, I'll be going on a family vacation we can't change (life is tough). But...

... As soon as I get back,  I'll be launching a set of coordinated  efforts, including a reliable Tip of the Day focused on Silverlight 2*.

The new Tip of the Day will publish no later than  1pm Eastern, at least 5 days a week and will be part of a much larger effort that will include frequent Silverlight 2 blog posts, How Do I videos, monthly Webcasts and more.  Stay tuned; many details to come.

*Note: we've announced that we will be releasing Silverlight 2 during the first Quarter, which means by March 31. This note in no way implies any change to that plan.

Silverlight 1.0 for Total Novices [Updated]

 I received two emails today asking that I repost my recommendations on how to get started with Silverlight 1.0. Here you go....

The best way to get started is to go to the Silverlight site  and click on Get Starged

From there you can click on Get Started to download the files you need. My advice would be to:

• Skip the  Watch the Getting Started Video
• Download the Silverlight 1.0 runtime(s)
• Download the Developer tools
• VS 2008
• Silverlight 1.1 Tools For VS 2008 (yes 1.1, even though you'll be building 1.0)
• ASP.NET Futures
• Download the designer tools
• Blend 2
• Encoder
• Design (optional)
• Download the 1.0 SDK(s)

For now, you really only need Silverlight 1.0 and can safely skip the 1.1 files, except that you will want Silverlight 1.1 Tools For VS 2008 because it includes what you need to write Silverlight 1.0 applications in Visual Studio 2008 as explained here.

After downloading your files and installing them, return to Silverlight.net and click on  Learn. (as shown in the image above). Then click on the 1.0 Videos.

Start with the following videos: #1, #3, #57, #24, #49, #30, #34, #36 in that order.  [ Update: Oops - they renumbered!!   I'll get you the new numbers as soon as the site numbering settles down, or else I'll get you links. For now, please look for introductory videos and ignore the numbers ]

Then explore other videos, or click on QuickStarts for another perspective on getting going.

Finally, as you explore further, and questions arise, please be sure to join our Forums where, to date, over 11,000 members have contributed to nearly 20,000 topics (don't panic, it is very well organized!)

Best of luck, and please do let me know if I can be of further help,

Jesse Liberty
Silverlight Geek

Tip of the Day: How To Answer: Will This Work In Silverlight 2.0?

I'm beginning to receive a lot of email about what is coming in Silverlight 2.0. Today's was pretty typical, so I thought I'd post the questions and answers (without revealing anything specific about this writer's application), as  a guide to the kind of response you can expect.  (Published early today to get an answer to this reader!)

Please note, the best place for this kind of question is our Forum, where you'll get a far faster and more comprehensive answer; but I do understand why some folks write directly.

Here is the (slightly edited) letter with my response

I am the architect [responsible for redoing the UI of a large calculator/spreadsheet that is now in ASP.NET and that goes back to the server for all its calculations. I'd like to consider Silverlight rather than AJAX to move the calculations to the client, with the main benefit being managed code]...

If we rebuild the application in Silverlight (assuming 2.0 with a 2009 go live) would we be able to use the existing c# libraries built out for validation and calculation without reworking them? ... plug-in and [access our rules on the client. This would eliminate a lot of round trips and network traffic.]

I want to give you all the information I can, but for the moment I have to give you somewhat  less information than will be available once we release Silverlight 2, which we will do very soon. The release date remains 1st Quarter of this year for Beta 1 (that is, no later than March 31). I'm willing to go out on a limb and say we're working hard to come in a bit early.

So I'm going to ask that you re-send this question to me after we release, if that is okay. In the meantime, I’ll do some research to see if I’m at Liberty™ to say more.

The specifics of what will be in Silverlight 2 has not been announced, though some general guidelines have been written about here.  We have said, for example, that we’ll support C#, and that we’ll support a significant subset of the CLR.

Let's assume we wanted to get something done ....today  [using Silverlight 1.0 for now] Could I put a hidden Silverlight component on the page that encapsulates the c# libraries from the server? Then I could simply swap out the Ajax post-backs on each existing field for a js call to the Silverlight engine and update the fields accordingly.

You could certainly create a hidden Silverlight 1.0 control on your page.  It  in turn, could certainly interact with a web service and/or do work on the client side. And further, you could later swap this out and replace it with a more powerful Silverlight 2 control. 

On the other hand, I'm not convinced this is a big win; because by the time you have your 1.0 component working 2.0 will be ready and they will work quite differently.  For example, Scott's blog entry notes that Silverlight 2 will support "two-way data-binding support" -

I don't think I'm giving away anything to say that we'll have extensive data support; I'd hate to see you build an infrastructure only to throw it away. Frankly, I think it would be a bigger "win" to spend your time, for example, reading chapter 5 in Programming WPF -- while the details in Silverlight 2 may be slightly different, Silverlight 2 is so closely related this will be time very well spent. See this Tip of the Day for more.

As a side question, if all I was doing was building a rules/calculator engine in Silverlight I would assume that all things being equal it would run faster and have a smaller bandwidth footprint than an equivalent js class. Is this the case?

There is no question that if you build such an engine in C# vs. .js it will be smaller and far faster.

So basically, am I on the correct track with this? I don't want to misuse the new Silverlight technology as my predecessor did when they misused Ajax.

Sounds to me like you are very much on track. AJAX is great, and has all sorts of advantages, but you seem to value performance very highly and Silverlight 2.0's huge advantage for you will be the ability to code with C# and the CLR.

I can assure you that as we announce Silverlight 2.0 we’ll be providing a great deal of documentation and support through Silverlight.net I wish I could say more today; I’m not trying to be coy; but we want to make sure that we deliver on what we say and we do so with a unified and coherent voice. That will be very soon.

If I learn more about your specific questions, I will certainly send you a private email. In the meantime, thanks for your patience.

A side note to readers of Tip of the Day: Due to circumstances, Tip of the Day will be spotty for a while; probably off the air for a few days, and less frequent than I'd like leading up to Mix. I promise to make it up by a huge outpouring of Tips starting after my incredibly ill-timed vacation ends  on March 18. At that point, you can expect no fewer than 5 Tips of the Day per week through the summer.

Kind Words, the fuel of cooperative communities...

A very kind reader sent this, and I am incredibly happy to share it with you.  Stay tuned for another Tip of the Day later today.

In getting ready for Silverlight 2 I've been playing with some early bits. Today I began to see how much easier some things are going to be and your eagerness to know is now far exceeded by my eagerness to tell.  Soon, soon.

[Interesting. I've been having some qc issues with images. Must keep an eye on that.]

Tip of the Day - Popfly

Mix is fast upon us, and to be perfectly honest, I'm preparing frantically. That means that I've been behind in my Tip of the Day. Rather than closing it down, I want to take the three weeks between now and Mix and really focus on some areas of Silverlight 1.0 that I've not been paying enough attention to.

We know that Silverlight 2 is just around the corner; while we've not announced its release date, we've said it will be in Q1, which means a matter of weeks. Let me assure you that will many of my Tips of the Day and blog posts will be on Silverlight 2, which after all will be new and exciting (and amazing) it will also be Beta, while SL 1 is a released product, and so will not be neglected.

One of the areas that I personally have been meaning to pay more attention to is Popfly.  With the attention it has been given by my publisher, I thoght this might be a good time to start.

I decided to start with the Popfly videos. I watched the 30 second video and based my starter app on that. To begin, I grabbed the Twitter block and set its properties to my Twitter account.

Clicking on the wrench (see arrow) opens the block for you to set its properties,

I added some arrows to the image above to make pointing out the pieces a bit easier.

The three black arrows point to the three properties for this block..

The first, set by a drop down, lets you decide which operation you want the block to perform (I chose getFriendsPosts).

The second asks for your Twitter user name, and the third asks  how many posts you want to get at a time.

The blue arrow (near the top)  points to a button that lets you see the actual JavaScript code that implements this Popfly control,

As noted in the highlighted area, you are free to edit the Javascript directly if you can't help yourself, but Popfly is designed to work wihtout your having to write any code at all.

At any time, you can click preview to see the results of your work so far; in this case, my one Popfly block running alone.

When I click preview, the block goes out to Twitter, finds the account and returns my Twitter notification

This isn't quite what I wanted, but that is not a problem. I click on Customize and  the block comes back. Click on the wrench, the edit block comes back.

I can edit the properties and I can count on tooltips to help me determine the meaning of the properties.

Each small change is easy to test by clicking on preview

Adding a 2nd Block 

When I have the block working the way I want, I can add a second block, and most important, I can "mash them up" by clicking first on one and then on the second. If the output of the first is meaningful to the input of the second... voila!

In this case, I'll drag on a news reader as my second block.

The News Reader block  is happy to take the output of the Twitter block as its input.

To create the connection, click on the source (Twitter) and then the receiver (NewsReader) and the popfly editor creates the link

To see the link at work, just hit preview.

The console output (visible at the bottom of the page) makes the interaction explicit:

Twitter:
twitter: Calling getLatestFriendsPosts("jesseliberty", 10)...
Getting data from http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/jesseliberty.xml?nocache=
      Tue Feb 12 14:05:35 2008...
The call to http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/jesseliberty.xml?nocache=
     Tue Feb 12 14:05:35 2008 returned with status 200.

News Reader:
newsReader: Calling addNewsItem("SilverlightNews", "Tue Feb 12 18:59:06 +0000 2008", 
    "Tip of the Day - Getting Ready for Silverlight 2 - http://ittyurl.net/5UIG", 
      http://www.silverlightcream.com/)...

That's it. Save and I've got my first working Popfly Mashup.

More to come.

Tip of the Day: Programming with Media in 1.0

A user posted a comment in response to one of our videos (did you know you can do that now??)

I thought others might want the answer as well....

This quick start on media may be a good next step. 

There are a number of How Do I videos on using media. 

I'd recommend starting on the Learn page, click on Silverlight 1.0 and take a look at videos # 28, 29, 30, 52.

Then return to the Learn Page again, but this time click on Expression Blend and take a look at #6,8,10.

You might also find these three postings useful supplements.

Hope that helps.

-jesse

[updateed 20:06 GMT 5;  2008-Feb 10 to improve image quality]

One more gadget (the ego never quits)

I woke up at 5 this morning, so I decided to take apart the Silverlight Tip of the Day gadget that Kelly White had so kindly created and, as an exercise in egomania, modify it to display all my blog entries, rather than just those that are tagged as Tip of the Day.

It turned out to be an interesting adventure in playing with Sidebar gadgets, in the frustration of making sure you find all the references to all the images, and not much more than that (oh yes, it was a good time sink).

In any case, here it is, if you want a copy: Silverlight Blog.gadget.zip.  Just unzip it into the usual gadget folder and it will run side by side with the Tip of the Day gadget, or you can choose one or the other or neither.

Now, to make this at all relevant, the next step is to put a Silverlight control together that does the same thing. That would be worth blogging about!

Tip of the Day - Getting Ready for Silverlight 2

We have announced that Silverlight 2 Beta 1, will be released during the first 3 months of this year (that is, any day now) with a go-live license. It is important to keep in mind that this will be a beta product, and that 1.0 will be a release product, but you can bet that there will be a lot of interest in Silverlight 2 because it is... well.. fantastic.  And filled with great stuff. (And is the proximate cause for my ending 12 years as an independent contract programmer and becoming a  Microsoft employee!)

So, as you can guess, like lots of folks in and out of Microsoft, I'm busy ramping up a huge amount of material have ready as soon as Silverlight 2 is released  (though I promise not to neglect Silverlight 1.0). And, like lost of folks, I've found that there is a lot to learn.

I'm asked at least once a day how developers can start learning 2.0 even before they get their hands on the bits. Or the documentation. Well, I can in fact tell you, without getting fired, if I word it very carefully. 

Silverlight uses XAML and while we've not announced the complete set of controls that will be implemented in Silverlight 2.0, if you review Scott's blog post again you'll find that we hae said that there will be layout manager support, two way databinding support, control template and skinning support along wth textbox, checkbox, radiobutton, StackPanel, Grid, TabControl., Slider, rich networking support, generics, isolated storage,

That turns out to be a lot of information about what to look for in Silverlight 2 (though not necessarily in Beta 1), and all of that is a subset of what is already well documented in WPF.  So if you are eager to get going, you can hit the books today with a good book on WPF. Here are three I think are particularly good:

Programming WPF by Chris Sells, Ian Griffiths Read more about this title...

Windows Presentation Foundation Unleashed (WPF) (Unleashed) by Adam Nathan Read more about this title...

Essential Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) (Microsoft .NET Development Series) by Chris Anderson Read more about this title...

For example; let's say that in reviewing Scott's article you decide you'd like to get a head start on understanding how controls are going to work. No one can promise which controls will be in the beta, nor that they'll be precisely as they are in WPF, but I'm willing to go on record saying that spending the time reading chapter 5 in the Sells/Griffiths book would be time well spent, as would be true with the other 2 books.

I'm sorry this ran a bit late today and I hop you find it a helpful start.