Thanks to Adam Kinney (again!) for this awesome Halloween greetings card, brought to you by Silverlight and Silverlight Streaming.
The full source code can be found on Adam's blog.
Adam Kinney wrote a good blog entry last week on the importance for site authors of considering the first-time experience of a visitor. I guess most readers of this blog have Silverlight installed today, but at least in these first months as we focus on getting the plug-in broadly deployed, it's particularly important that site authors take care to test the experience of a visitor who doesn't already have Silverlight on their machine. The Silverlight installation process itself is fairly straightforward: we've done everything possible to minimize the number of clicks between site visit and first-time control instantiation, but our own work with early adopter sites has shown there are best practices that can greatly improve the user experience.
To that end, here are a few helpful tips:
To make this even easier, we've created a small download package that provides further guidance around installation in the form of a whitepaper and sample code. This MSI package doesn't make any changes to your machine except to extract the documentation and whitepaper to your documents folder. In our experience, it's well worth the hour or so it takes to implement these changes to your site to get the most out of Silverlight: it makes your site look more professional and reduces user confusion.
People frequently ask me how they can learn WPF quickly. Now the technology has been on the market for a while, there are a number of different choices: books from the likes of Petzold, Moroney, Nathan, MacDonald, Anderson and Sells/Griffiths, classroom training from companies like Pluralsight, Wintellect, Developmentor and IdentityMine, and online tutorials like those from Nibbles or lynda.com.
I'm excited to announce another choice today: we've made available a three-day virtual training course that covers all aspects of WPF as part of MIX University, and it's completely free! This course was delivered here on campus in Redmond earlier this year for a small invited audience, and as we drew up the syllabus and speaker list, we realized we had something special on our hands. You'll hear a keynote from Ian Ellison-Taylor, the general manager responsible for WPF, Silverlight and client platform tools; introductory sessions on core WPF topics from external luminaries like Ian Griffiths; depth training by talented and knowledgeable speakers from the product group such as Beatriz Costa and Kevin Moore; and lastly, five sessions on real-world experiences from early adopters who built applications ranging from The North Face kiosk application to the new Yahoo Messenger client. As if that wasn't enough, we've also included nine self-paced hands-on labs you can use as a starting point for your own experimentation and further learning.
Naturally, all the session videos are presented using Silverlight, so make sure you install that on your machine prior to visiting the website (you've already installed it though, right?!)
Let us know what you like and don't like about this course - we're thinking of running another one in the New Year that will be updated to include further content around Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend 2.0; we'll make that available online in due course too.
A couple of months ago, we conducted an experiment where we offered our lab facilities and technical resources here in Redmond to companies building Silverlight sites or applications that wanted assistance in resolving issues. We were really delighted with the results of this venture; we saw some great Silverlight projects and found a few key last-minute bugs. The feedback from the developers who attended was also extremely positive, as the following verbatim examples indicate:
"[I] got more accomplished in three days than I did in the past two weeks and now have a clear path to completion" "We enjoyed having access to key team members (both on products and evangelists) and they were more than willing to hear our concerns and help solve our problems." "The hope was to gain further insights into Silverlight technology and to have a chance to spend some focused time with Silverlight. My expectations were met and exceeded."
"[I] got more accomplished in three days than I did in the past two weeks and now have a clear path to completion"
"We enjoyed having access to key team members (both on products and evangelists) and they were more than willing to hear our concerns and help solve our problems."
"The hope was to gain further insights into Silverlight technology and to have a chance to spend some focused time with Silverlight. My expectations were met and exceeded."
Based on the positive reaction, we've decided to run another one of these labs, and we have a limited number of spaces available to offer for companies who are currently working on a Silverlight 1.0 project.
Here's the format: the lab runs over four days from Monday, November 12th to Thursday, November 15th. On Monday, we'll run an optional day of training that covers Silverlight 1.0, so if you're still getting up to speed on the technology and tools that allow you to build great Silverlight sites, this day should be helpful. Between Tuesday and Thursday, we'll have three days of issue resolution labs: every company attending gets their own private lab office with several machines pre-configured with a Silverlight development environment (plus the ability to bring in your own machines, of course). You can work as late as you like - the facility is open until you leave the building. We'll provide great support and technical assistance - you can have someone sit down alongside you to help you with your questions; if you've got a thorny bug, we'll pull in the relevant folk to diagnose and if necessary, log a bug then and there. It's a great place to really focus on closing down issues, getting all your questions resolved in a timely fashion, and simply enjoying the leafy ambience of Redmond. We'll even throw in a visit to the company store and visitor center. Naturally, you're responsible for your own travel and accommodation expenses.
If you're interested, drop me a line via the "email" link above. We can accept a maximum of four developers per company. Let me know what you're building, your prior experience level with Silverlight, and a little information about the company you represent.
This is a great opportunity that doesn't come around very often: I'd encourage you to make the most of it!
As a great example of what you can do today with Silverlight 1.0, I thought I'd bring this sample application, developed by Novera Consulting, to everyone's attention. I first met up with these guys when they responded to my invitation to attend a Silverlight issue-resolution lab that we ran a couple of months ago. In many ways, they're a great demonstration of the value of running labs like this - both of us gained hugely from the interaction and feedback. Incidentally, we're running another similar lab in a month - do you have a Silverlight 1.0-based site that you're working on that you'd like to work with us on?
The Novera election site can be found here: after selecting your party, you proceed to a page that looks like the screenshot above, where you can see each of the different candidates, information about their campaign and funding, as well as a link to a cool campaign trail visualization which was created as a Virtual Earth mash-up. In some ways, the app feels like a high-end AJAX page, which of course it is in that it uses asynchronous JavaScript and XML - but instead of targeting the HTML DOM, it's using the XAML DOM which gives them all the benefits of animation, 2D graphics, video and an asynchronous download object. At the risk of being seen as outspoken, it's my contention that we're starting to hit the ceiling of what an HTML-based architecture can deliver, and that's why this kind of incremental move to a richer presentation technology that doesn't throw out all the other underpinnings of the web is an attractive way forward.
The one thing I'd have liked to see this application improve on is the installation experience for site visitors who don't already have the Silverlight 1.0 plug-in installed on their machine. It's easy to use the inPlaceInstallParameter option in conjunction with a placeholder graphic to create an inviting and non-intrusive experience that gets Silverlight installed on your machine with as few as three mouse clicks.
Interestingly, the 2008 US Election campaign was the inspiration for a second Silverlight site focusing on the candidates that MSN created as an election guide. But I honestly rather prefer the Novera version at a technical level - they've been more creative in their use of Silverlight and it demonstrates well how subtle visual cues like animation can be used to help visitors navigate around a site.