VS Live Orlando "Introduction to Silverlight programming"

I just got back from VS Live in Orlando where I was pinch hitting for Jesse Liberty and presented a talk titled "Introduction to Silverlight programming".

I wasn't familiar with Jesse's talk so I threw something together base on a new hands-on-Lab from Sascha Corti at Microsoft Switzerland.  It's a great walk-through leveraging several of the new Silverlight 2 controls to build a working Silverlight application.

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This hands-on-Lab was originally developed using Expression Blend 2.5 to build the Silverlight UI.  Since this was a VS Live presentation I thought it would be fun to create a VS track through this lab using the great XAML intellisense in VS.

During the talk we covered:

  • Creating Silverlight projects in VS
  • Editing Silverlight pages in Expression Blend
  • Layout using Grid and StackPanel
  • TextBlock vs TextBox
  • WatermarkTextBox
  • DatePicker
  • Slider
  • How to create a DropDownList from a user control
  • Asynchronous WCF service calls
  • DataGrid

Homework left for the audience:

  • Add the picture gallery using a ListBox and data binding using {Binding } syntax
  • Using type converters to create a Image URL
  • Add the pop-up with car details using storyboard animations
  • Add improved styling for the DataGrid and Slide

Attached to this post is the slide deck along with my script for the VS Track through the hands-on-lab.  A great place to start is to simply download the lab and start working your way though it.  Sascha has done a great job of documenting each step along way.

Tools used in lab:

Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Silverlight 2
Expression Blend 2.5 Preview
MSDN Tech Talk and Hands-on-Lab "Silverlight 2"

References

Jesse Liberty's Slides and Code from VS Live San Francisco
http://silverlight.net/blogs/jesseliberty/archive/2008/04/03/slides-and-code-from-vs-live.aspx

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