Jesse Liberty - Silverlight Geek

By, For and About Silverlight Developers

My Commitment To Support Silverlight 2 Developers

Silverlight 2 is big. Very big. It's great, but it is very big,  with many cool features.

So we're preparing. And all that preparation means that there will be a lot of information,  and  many paths through that information.  My goal is to ensure that  Silverlight.net always has more than enough information to be the one-stop home for the community of Silverlight developers. 

As a step in that direction,  I'd like to tell you a little about my own plans for providing an integrated set of materials to make learning  Silverlight 2 easier. 

Silverlight The Plan

My plan, subject to  management intervention ("stop that and get back to sharpening pencils"), your feedback ("you call that a tutorial?"), or unexpected acts of the Gods ("oh look,  locusts")  is this:

The day we release Silverlight 2,  I will post a number of on-line tutorials  here on Silverlight.net with links through my blog.  These  tutorials will be targeted at .NET developers,  but I will not assume the reader has experience in Silverlight or WPF .

Each tutorial will be filled with illustrations and working examples (that you can download separately), and each will run about 4,000 - 5,000 words (the equivalent of about 20 pages), or more as needed.

The goal is for the Silverlight 2 tutorials to  compliment rather than replace or repeat the Silverlight 2 documentation. The tutorials are targeted at working developers who prefer more explanation rather than less, but my assumption is a high level of professional expertise; these are not for hobbyists; and they are not fluff.

HowDoISL2  Along with these tutorials I will also post the first of my new How Do I video series on programming Silverlight 2. This new series will be a compliment to the tutorials; not repeating the material; but demonstrating concepts through developing examples in screen-capture videos, and adding a new level of post-production enhancement to increase their value.


After we release, I'll personally commit to at least the following every month...

  • Two tutorials, each covering a Silverlight 2 topic in detail, starting with the most compelling topics 
  • 6 How Do I videos
  • A Deep Dive Webcast
  • 20 Tips of the Day
  • Numerous blog entries on Silverlight 2 news, events, and more

Also, Tim Heuer and I have committed to writing  Programming Silverlight, to be published by O'Reilly Media this year.

I certainly will not be the only person producing material on Silverlight 2 (far from it) but I hope to create a useful set of multi-media material, and to do so in a very predictable pattern that you will be able to rely on. 

In addition, I'll be taking the opportunity to go to events to present on Silverlight development; which will give me a chance to talk with and listen to the developer community directly.

ScottGuBlog 
In  the meantime, Scott Guthrie, our new Vice President (congratulations Scott!) , has released a sneak peek of Silverlight 2 that you don't want to miss, complete with his own 8-part tutorial !

Posted: Feb 25 2008, 08:50 AM by jesseliberty | with 18 comment(s) |
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Comments

simonech said:

Hi Jesse,

I really love all your tips: I found a annoying bug with SL 1.1, but did't get a feedback from anyone from MS on the forum.

I think it's a kind of stop over bug:

silverlight.net/.../32041.aspx

Do you know if this has been fixed in SL 2.0?

# February 25, 2008 9:50 AM

BenHayat said:

Jesse, I read the list of things you're planning to do and if you don't get dragged away from it or plan on a long vacation, the list is excellent source of information. I sent a suggestion email last night to Scott regarding addition of one more section, but since you're also involved with "Silverlight.Net" site, I'll just post my suggestion here for you to see, in case you can do something about it:

-----------

"I'd like to make a suggestion that you may want to pass it to the proper channel. Just looking at your blog alone, you can see how many questions are coming up about SL. And many are valid and relates to many people. And same questions (as of version 1.1) were popping up on the forum. I think to save you and your team and us time, it would be very helpful that on Silverlight.Net, to add a new section that SL team will add questions and answers there (Q&A Section). Developers can post questions and then someone with deep knowledge answers them. This will be great to have only one place to go to for answers from the right source and would speed the beta testing as well."

-------------

Thank you as always!

..Ben

# February 25, 2008 10:41 AM

Wöchentliche Rundablage: Silverlight 2, ASP.NET MVC, WPF, C# 3.0, CardSpace, OpenID | Code-Inside Blog said:

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# February 25, 2008 1:28 PM

StephenVA said:

I agree with Ben about having a single place for answers.

I'm trying to find out about plans for printing support in SL2.0, and haven't been able to so far.

I'm working on an idea for a reporting solution for my stage agency using SL2.0, and printing out the reports would be essential.

(Maybe there is already an answer and someone can point me to it.)

Thanks,

Stephen

# February 25, 2008 1:41 PM

DotNetKicks.com said:

You've been kicked (a good thing) - Trackback from DotNetKicks.com

# February 25, 2008 2:10 PM

jesseliberty said:

>> I'm trying to find out about plans for printing support in SL2.0, and haven't been able to so far.<<

We have actually released very little information about what will be in Silverlight 2.

There have, to my knowledge been only two public posts; here are the links:

http://tinyurl.com/2kc7yr  - see the part on Silverlight 2

http://tinyurl.com/2u2drt  - a sneak peek on Silverlight 2

I apologize again for the frustration, but full release is just around the corner at which time all these questions will be answered and then some!

Thanks!

-j

# February 25, 2008 2:36 PM

StephenVA said:

Hey, no frustration here, so don't worry. I know it's all very new and I just need to wait, so I'll continue working on my idea and see what the full release of SL2.0 brings.

Thanks for the update Jesse. State gov't can move slowly anyway, so I'm really in no rush.

# February 25, 2008 3:04 PM

party42 said:

Hiya Jesse,

Thanks for keeping us updated. Although I appreciate all the effort your putting into new developers just getting to know Silverlight, could you also spend some time (or shed some light) on the big migration issue for early adapters who've been using SL since the start (and, personally speaking, have created an enormous code base to overcome initial shortcomings). So what are best practices refactoring all of this?

Ie: we've created a few projects with about 60 controls (ranging from textbox to dateTime picker) which somehow now all inherit from FrameworkElement. In the next release, would you recommend inheriting from Button or Textbox?

(thanks for all the work though you're putting in :) )

# February 25, 2008 9:08 PM

Daily Bits - February 26, 2008 | Alvin Ashcraft's Daily Geek Bits said:

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# February 26, 2008 9:29 AM

Parthasarathy Mandayam said:

Official Silverlight Geek has committed to bringing developers a ton of resources to master Silverlight

# February 26, 2008 11:26 AM

Reflective Perspective - Chris Alcock » The Morning Brew #41 said:

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# February 27, 2008 3:22 AM

JoeReynolds said:

It seems difficult to obtain answers in the Silverlight Forums. For example, I'm having problems implementing the Mediaplayer control.

I'm trying to add chapter info to the MediaPlayer contol info from a xml datasource.

Here's my final problem. To add a chaper in codebehind requires a Position item, and the position item has a type of Double. Now, the actual position of a chapter in a video might have the format of  00.13.50.3064004.

How does one convert "00.13.50.3064004" to a Double??????

# February 27, 2008 2:19 PM

My Commitment To Support Silverlight 2 Developers said:

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# February 29, 2008 5:32 AM

Jesse Liberty - Silverlight Geek said:

As part of the impending release of Silverlight 2, I promised in a recent blog post to provide what I

# March 3, 2008 6:18 PM

Blogs said:

As part of the impending release of Silverlight 2, I promised in a recent blog post to provide what I

# March 3, 2008 6:46 PM

Jesse Liberty - Silverlight Geek said:

First, thank you for your incredible patience!! This is the first of the new Silverlight 2 Tip of the

# March 4, 2008 9:01 AM

Blogs said:

First, thank you for your incredible patience!! This is the first of the new Silverlight 2 Tip of the

# March 4, 2008 9:09 AM

Mirrored Blogs said:

First, thank you for your incredible patience!! This is the first of the new Silverlight 2 Tip of the

# March 4, 2008 9:34 AM