What I'm Thinking About April
I've been getting a lot of mail on the lines of "When will we have Beta 2?" or "what is the release date for Silverlight" and since I can't answer those questions, and since I know that folks need to plan, I thought I'd tell you what I can know (at least to some degree) and that is what I hope and plan to do in the next six weeks in terms of producing learning material for Silverlight 2 Beta 1. So, very briefly, here are my plans for through the end of April (just in case you are interested).
1. The first week in April I'll be presenting at VS Live San Francisco. Two presentations:
- Introduction to Silverlight 2 Programming
- Silverlight 2 Data Binding
I'll also try to attend the Birds of a feather lunch on Tuesday. Once these presentations are complete, I will post them here for your use and / or feedback.
Presentations
According to one of the more useful new sites, Tripit, I'll be flying from SF to Redmond late Wednesday afternoon, and spending the rest of the week talking with the team about Silverlight 2 and trying to uncover what it is I don't know that I don't know.
Webcasts
The first of the Silverlight 2 Webcasts - Live From Redmond (not) Silverlight 2 and Event Handling.
How Do I Videos
Plans for Videos in April include (among other things) interacting with databases, web services and XML, Streaming, Deep Zoom (with Dave Isbitski) and more.
Tutorials
I hope to release two tutorials in April, and as noted previously, I plan to take them out of order, that is to say tackling some advanced topics even before covering all the more introductory topics.
Upcoming tutorials might include topics such as
- Data Templates
- Linq and Databases
- Networking
- Custom Controls
- Dependency Properties
- Data Binding and Databases
- Data Binding and Web Services
- Transforms and Animation
- Isolated Storage
- Advanced Templates and Parts
- Graphics
- Animation
- Interacting with HTML
- Interacting with ASP.NET / AJAX
Note that I've listed 7 months of tutorials off the top of my head, so take this list as brainstorming, not as a plan. This is the opposite of announcing only when you "know" -- and is more like "here's a peek into the chaos of my thinking"
Programming Silverlight 2 - Table Of Contents
My goal is to have a first draft of the Table of Contents for Programming Silverlight 2 (O'Reilly Media) which I will post here in case you find it interesting and to get your feedback if you would like to participate. There may be some areas blacked out due to unannounced features.
More soon.