Free Book Chapter - Silverlight 1.1 in Action Early Adoper Open for Business!

Hello,

I am excited to announce that we have opened up early access to "Silverlight 1.1 in Action." If you have an interest in joining or pre-ordering, please click here. If you are hesitant, you can read chapter 1 for FREE through here. I feel obligate to mention that the page count is just an estimation. There may be more, there may be less. Regardless, here is my personal overview and opinions on the first two chapters.

Chapter 1

This chapter is really an overview of Silverlight and describes what I call the three "Ps" of Silverlight. In addition it provides an overview of XAML as well as a walkthrough to give you a feel for the designer / developer workflow available within Silverlight. You will need to provide you own .wmv file to get the walkthrough to work. However, I will be posting a special surprise once the full book is completed.

Personally, I feel a large majority of technical books focus on the "what" and "how", but rarely address the "why". For this reason, I wanted to address the why right off the bat. Admittedly, this chapter is not very technical (there is still a fair amount of code), however, I still feel it is incredibly valuable.

One of the questionable items in chapter 1 has been the "color" or tone. It is incredibly upbeat. Personally, that was my goal. My feelings are, if you are buying a book, you should feel good about it (as long as the content is technically correct). If you feel it is inappropriate, please feel free to post a comment on this blog.

Chapter 2

This chapter jumps right into the technical details. Throughout this chapter you will unlock the mysteries of the Silverlight plugin. This chapter will also show you how to manipulate the HTML DOM from managed code, as well as, work with managed code from script. When all is said and done, you should be able to masterfully integrate Silverlight content within your web applications. Once again, this chapter ends with a walkthrough to give you a hands on way to solidfy the chapter's content.

Personally, I originally overlooked the significance of the ability to work between the HTML DOM and managed code. However now, I view it as probably one of Silverlight's most important features. It really is that cool.

For the early adopters, let me proactively answer the question "when will the rest of the content become available?" I want to release chapters, in order. They will be released based upon the accuracy of the content in relation to future availability of Silverlight 1.1. For this reason, I cannot give you an exact date. I can tell you that there are several other chapters completed or near completed. However, because of the structure of the book, I really feel it is important to release the content sequentially.

I look forward to your comments related to the content that has been posted. The good news is, the content has not been sent to the printing press yet, so if there is something you despise, please let me know. I will review it and see if we can work something out.

I want to thank everyone that participated in the book raffle. There were 157 of you and the winners have been notified. Now, back to working on Chapter 11 of Silverlight 1.1 in Action.