Silverlight Resources

Cross posted at http://davidcrow.ca/article/1637/silverlight-resources

I’m about to start building my first Silverlight project. Qixing and I have started compiling a list of publicly available Silverlight materials. I have a couple of hurdles get over in building this application. I find the Microsoft deployment environments significantly different than my traditional Unix background. My guess is that I’m probably building a Silverlight 1.1 alpha application just because I’m going to want to consume a set of web services. Here is the list of resources we put together:

What is possible with Silverlight and Expression?

• Top Banana online video browsing, sorting, and editing tool.
• Silverlight Airlinesvisually mapping out your flight route.
• Silverlight Showcase includes examples from NETFLIX, BBC, CBC, and more.
• Microsoft Popfly is a easy way to build and share mashups and web pages. Here's a videoto see Popfly in action.
• Major League Baseball (MLB)
• Netflix demo from Mix07 by Neil Hunt of Netflix and Darin Brown of Avenue A/Razorfish
• MIX website All MIX sessions are on-demand. Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie's  keynote is highly recommended and  introduces next web

What do users need?

• Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 Release Candidate Mac or Windows
• Microsoft Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh Mac or Windows

What does my team need?

Designer Tools

• Microsoft Expression Studio
• Expression Blend 2 (download the most recent preview version) Design tool to create user interaction for Silverlight
• Expression Design Vector-based illustration and design tool
• Expression Media - digital asset management tool
• Expression Media Encoder Allows users to create and enhance Silverlight enabled videos

Developer Tools

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2
• Silverlight Tools Alpha Refresh for Visual Studio

What training and resources are available?

Training

• A lot of training materials are available at the Expression Product site.
• Lynda.com training
• Getting Started with Expression Blend by Lee Brimelow
• Getting Started with Expression Design by Ted LoCascio
• Expression Web Essential Training with Joe Marini
• Expression Blend Beta Previewwith Lee Brimelow
• Nibble Tutorials Snack-sized tutorials on building RIA using Silverlight and Blend
• Silverlight Screencasts by Tim Sneath's Team each video is about 5 mins long on a particular topic of using Silverlight.
• How-Do-I Video Series Expression videos, WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) videos.
• 32 Video presentations from Mix 2007

Silverlight Resources

• Microsoft Silverlight Homepage
• Microsoft Silverlight Developers Center
• Silverlight.net a more community-oriented site than the link above, which includes a lot of Silverlight showcases built by Microsoft partners and community enthusiasts.
• Silverlight 1.0 Beta QuickStart a quick guide of different parts you'll need to create a Silverlight application.
• Silverlight 1.1 Alpha QuickStart

Related Microsoft Tools

• Microsoft Design a central place to communicate about Microsoft's design culture, mission, experiences, people, and much more.
• WindowsClient.net a new community site for WPF and Windows Forms, which provides a common place for the community to understand a unified .NET/Windows client offering.
• WPF Hands-on Labs including "Using Data Binding in WPF," Creating Rich 2D and 3D content in WPF," and much more.

Related Blogs

• Expression Team Blog provides updated Expression product news, links to samples and tutorials. There are links to individual team member's blogs on the site as well.
• Tim Sneath's Blog is great at aggregating examples that best showcase the technologies.
• David Anson's Silverlight blog