Silverlight - Updates

• On November 29, Scott Guthrie announced that Silverlight 1.1 will now be known as Silverlight 2.0. This is really exciting news. I think it will really help clear up some of confusion that is currently surrounding 1.0 vs. 1.1. Because of this...


• May the book title Silverlight 1.1 in Action rest in peace. However, this does not mean the book is cancelled. Oh no! Instead it is being appropriately named:


• Silverlight 2.0 in Action. The book cover and information will be updated to match the new title shortly. When this book is in your local book store, it will have been in development for over a year. That is a pretty long time for a technical publication. This should be a hint as to breadth and depth of content you should expect. Because of this, I think there will be a number of individual who will want to discuss the content. To help assist in this, I would like to announce the
• Silverlight 2.0 in Action Facebook Fan Page. Become a fan today (man I get cheesier each and every day, just ask my girlfriend's dog, Buster):

Popfly and Visual Studio 2008

Greetings,

Today I saw something that I thought was incredibly interesting.
Visual Studio 2008 is supposedly going to have a Popfly tie-in called "Popfly Explorer". If this is what it sounds like, I am SUPER excited. In fact, I haven't seen really any other blogs mention this. I think this will add a lot more excitement around Popfly and encourage even MORE mashup components. This is like taking webparts and putting them on 'roids (that's Steroids).

The full article is here.

The fact that this is being included in VS 2008 is nudging me towards adding another section in the final chapter of my book. Check out the comments on it thus far in the nice little Silverlight Streaming application in the upper right corner. Oh yeah, and the final chapter has a walkthrough related to Silverlight Streaming.

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.

Silverlight 1.1 Book Raffle!

Hello,

I am excited to announce we are VERY near opening up the early adopter program for my upcoming "Silverlight 1.1 in Action" book. In celebration of this event, I have been given TEN (10) coupons for one FREE Ebook. In order to provide everyone with an interest in Silverlight 1.1 an equal chance at this content, I have decided to create a raffle, where the winners will be randomly selected on Wednesday, October 24, 2007.

In order to enter the raffle, please send an e-mail with the subject of "October 2007 - Raffle" to "chads.email.is@gmail.com". Please provide your name within the body of the e-mail. It is important that you enter the subject correctly because I will be using a script to retrieve the participating e-mails. After the winners have been drawn you will receive one e-mail. This e-mail will either inform you that you have won, or someone else has won. If you win, you will be notified and you will have 48 hours to respond. If you do not respond within 48 hours, another particpant will be selected and you will not receive the coupon.

Your e-mail address WILL be kept private. In addition, I will NOT spam you to buy the book. You will receive only one e-mail stating whether or not you have won, unless you mention in the e-mail that you would like more communication related to Silverlight 1.1 in Action.

If you do not win, don't worry, you will still have the opportunity to get the content thanks to Manning Publishing's Early Access Program. If you are not familiar with this process you can find out more here. Once the early access program has opened specifically for my book, I will publish more information on this blog.

Good luck!

Silverlight 1.1 - October Speaking Events

Hello,

I have updated the Silverlight Events Wiki to show 2 upcoming events that I will be presenting at.
If you are in the Midwest area and have heard me present before, I would like to point out that these two presentations are going to present a VERY fast overview of Silverlight, however the majority of the time will be spent discussing the AWESOME potential for using the ASP.NET Futures to display Silverlight content, and one of the features that is one of my personal favorites, the ability to manipulate the HTML DOM via MANAGED CODE!

If you have the opportunity to join us, I hope you will. If you cannot, I will be posting my notes on this blog.

In addition, I felt I should inform everyone that my book (Silverlight 1.1 in Action) is coming along nicely. So far I am VERY pleased with the content and structure. I need to smooth out the transitions and content in chapters 1 and 2, however, after these chapters, I feel everything else is very smooth.
In order to proactively answer the question "when will it be available?", well, I cannot say. However, I can say that ultimately it depends on how stable the next Silverlight 1.1 public bits are. Once the 1.1 bits become available I will need to re-check the manuscript to ensure that the content is technically accurate and all of the code examples work.

I am writing A LOT of code examples, which will be made publicly available with the book. My goal with this book is not necessarily to be the first Silverlight 1.1 book (though that is definately a goal to shoot for), I am more focussed on being the first complete and accurate Silverlight 1.1 book.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Silverlight 1.1 - KY - Day of .NET Presentation

Hello,

On this past Friday, I organized and presented at the KY - Day of .NET. Overall, it was a great event and I am very happy with the participation from the attendees, organizers, representatives, speakers, and sponsers. Thank you so much.

As requested, the presentation I created can be downloaded from here.

For those that could not attend, you may find value in this presentation as it includes some material from the first chapter of my upcoming book "Silverlight 1.1 in Action". The material shows the number of computers that Silverlight can reach and some benchmarks related to performance.

Enjoy!

Silverlight 1.1 in Action - The Book Cover

Hello!

Today I officially selected the cover for my upcoming book "Silverlight 1.1 in Action". Here it is:



This cover is only a draft and I anticipate the "Silverlight 1.1" text will be fully exposed in the final version. The cover is consistent with Manning Publications Co. cover scheme. I specifically chose this cover because of the fact the guy is unsheathing a sword which is

• Awesome
• Consistent with the theme in the first chapter, which will be available on this blog fairly soon.

I hope you like it. If you would like to know more about Manning's cover approach, the information is available here

Silverlight 1.1 in Action - Blend

I would like to begin this post by SINCERELY thanking everyone that posted a comment on the last post. Your comments were sincerely helpful and provided valuable insights.

After reviewing all of the comments, I wanted to provide an update with the direction that I think (no guarantees) I am going to take in regards to incorporating Blend within my "Silverlight 1.1 in Action" book.

Today, I thought of a different approach which I think is a happy medium between the two options mentioned in the last post. I believe I am going to end each chapter in the first part of the book with a section called "Blending It All Together". This section will add value by:

• Giving readers the option of learning Blend as they progress through the book
• Keeping the focus of each chapter squarely on Silverlight
• Reiterating chapter contents in an interactive, optional fashion.

I'm going to play around with this to see how it works, but I'm pretty excited about it. It feels right.

Also, somebody asked, "when will the book be available?" As of right now, I have completed approximately 6 or 7 chapters. Because the book is targeting Silverlight 1.1 the availability of the book will be dependent upon the timeline of the Silverlight 1.1 release. The book is targeting Silverlight 1.1 because, this is the version that provides the powerful .NET Framework. At the moment Silverlight 1.1 is in an Alpha state so it is difficult to squarely answer the "when" question.

I want to make sure I am providing quality content that you can use. I plan on providing Chapter 1, for free, on this blog very shortly. I know this does not squarely answer the "when" question, however, if I were to give an estimate, I would say an electronic version will be available in October with a printed version being available around the February timeframe. Please bear in mind this is only an estimate.

Disclaimer: The items discussed regarding the Silverlight in Action book are merely thoughts and will not necessarily be in the final version of the book.

Silverlight 1.1 in Action - The Book

Hello!

I am currently working on a book that will target Silverlight 1.1, called "Silverlight 1.1 in Action" and I am seeking some feedback from the community. The first half of the book will address the UI elements of Silverlight, while the second half will discuss the .NET Framework provided with Silverlight 1.1.

Because the first half of the book is squarely focussed on UI components, I thought it would be nice to add some additional value to the book by explaining how to create the various UI components using Microsoft Expression Blend. The incorporation of Blend has caused some internal debate between me and myself. However, I feel that incorporating Blend is important because it may introduce readers to a new, productive tool, while at the same time, helping readers build a vocabularly that can help to communicate with designers more effectively. Essentially, for each UI element, I want to provide the following:

• An illustration that shows the UI element that is created
• The XAML that corresponds with the illustration
• A walkthrough of how to use Blend to create the UI element.

My debate is as follows:

Option 1 - Provide all three items (the illustration, the XAML, and the walkthrough) for each UI component. Here are the advantages/disadvantages I see with this approach:

• Advantages
  • Readers do not have to flip to the back of the book for Blend content.
  • Encourages the use of Blend while reading the text
• Disadvantages
  • Takes up a lot of space. This may cause the reader to skip pages to get back into the developer focussed content.

Here is a sample of creating a MediaElement to give you a feel for how this may look in the text if Option 1 is used.

Option 2 - Provide only the illustration and the XAML in the text. Then, reference a walkthrough which is provided in an appendix, instead of in the actual text. Here are the advantages/disadvantages I see with this approach:

• Advantages
  • Keeps the reader focussed on the developer related content.
• Disadvantages
  • Treats Blend as a second-rate citizen (it's not, it is especially helpful if you are creating animations)
  • Causes the reader to flip between the actual text and an appendix, this searching can be annoying.

Here is a sample of creating a MediaElement to give you a feel for how this may look in the text if Option 2 is used:


Personally, I am leaning towards Option 2, however, I wanted to seek some feedback before going too far down this path. I look forward to your comments and thank you for your help!