We've recently finished up on a 2-day Silverlight lab session for 20 partners who are currently on our Silverlight Early Adopter programme. It's great to see some of the cool things that ISVs are doing with Silverlight - especially around the media and IPTV spaces.

There were, generally, three types of person that came to the labs:

Upgrading to Silverlight 2.0

The first were those who've been actively working on Silverlight already (either Silverlight 1.0, or Silverlight 1.1) and wanted to know more about upgrading their application to Silverlight 2.0. Upgrading from 1.0 to 2.0 was a great experience, given that javascript can be called from Silverlight with ease. We came across some pain points between Silverlight 1.1 and 2.0 however, with some breaking changes between the two, but managed to resolve most of these. Are you having problems with this? Let us know.

Working with Silverlight 2.0

Some partners were already partway (or even, nearly all the way) through writing a commercial Silverlight 2.0 app and wanted some advice on patterns and practises, or with some deep technical problems. Mike Taulty was on hand for some of the more difficult technical questions, and has been blogging some of the answers that we came up with over the two days. Patterns and Practises though? Unfortunately these generally lag behind the releases of Microsoft products, so there's no official guidance yet. It'll be coming though, and feel free to get in touch if you've problems.

Learning Silverlight 2.0

Our third type of partner attending simply wanted to learn some more about Silverlight 2.0, and get some hands on experience with coding it. These guys were my favourites, because they didn't require so much one-on-one attention! Things did get rather busy over the two days. Fortunately, we had lots of hands-on-labs available, which were very useful to all those who took them - and are available for you too. So, go try out the Silverlight MIX labs over at Silverlight.Learn().

Good luck, and keep making cool stuff!