Page view counter

What do you think of my Silverlight How Do I Videos?

I'm always looking for ways to make this blog specifically and all my material on silverlight in general more interactive. Survey Monkey offers free surveys, so I thought I'd try it out by asking you to take a 1 page survey on what you think of my Silverlight 2 How Do I videos. If you have a moment you can take the survey here.

Also, don't forget that at the bottom of each video there is room for comments; your feedback is always welcome.

 

Thanks again.

Published 20 May 2008 09:38 PM by jesseliberty

Comments

# Dew Drop - May 21, 2008 | Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew said on 21 May, 2008 09:09 AM

Pingback from  Dew Drop - May 21, 2008 | Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew

# corbettkroehler said on 21 May, 2008 09:35 AM

It's very gratifying to know that developers are leveraging the Internet not just to do their job but to share their wisdom with those of us who struggle to remain on the front line of technology. Thank you!

# tiagoAlberto said on 21 May, 2008 07:00 PM

Hi Jesse,

I am a young developer of Portugal and i just want to say that you and the team of silverlight website and develop are just great. I see every day your blog posts and Scott posts. Just thanks for all the good work of give us tuturial videos and blog entries. Note: I work with Flash platform profissionaly, but í'm trying  to learn silverlight because it is beutiful.

Best Regards,

Tiago Alberto(PT)

# TraeMarshall said on 22 May, 2008 01:18 PM

What a survey with no comments included? You cheeky monkey.

While I think you and the others are doing a great job. While I understand why this is happening, I am highly disappointed that there is seemingly so very little love for designers. I’ll point out that Aldus all but handed the market over to Quark by deciding they could ignore the designers for awhile while focusing on the educational market.

While I understand that tutorials almost always tend to teach in bite size chunks, there seems to be a gaping hole in instructing designers starting with on how to construct and mange an entire site. Have I just missed it, but where is the Silverlight designer guru?

# BenHayat said on 22 May, 2008 10:24 PM

Hi Trae;

>>where is the Silverlight designer guru?<<

Not that I'm a designer guru to answer your question, but with Silverlight to get anything that's functional (even the simplest animation), there is a need for coding to create action. Blend gives you a lot of power but you need to write some code for some situations to have some form of result. So, if a solo designer thinks that I can develop a web site with Silverlight without coding, that's is not the case as of now. But a designer and developer can work great on the same project.

If you look at so many sites (look at the show case) and the majority of the UI were designed with Blend!

Hope this helps!

..Ben

# VideosBlow said on 23 May, 2008 02:41 PM

It is the opinion of my coworkers and I that video tutorials are all a HUGE waste.  We can't sit at work watching hours of video. . . .  If we need to know the syntax for some new silverlight feature or whatever we need TEXT documentation that is SEARCHABLE and easily and quickly accessed.  Searching through a video to see if it is going to show you what you want is just not efficient.

Stop wasting time with this video non-sense.  Just because it's "Cool" and new doesn't mean it's better.  Use the time/resources to improve real documentaion and write code sameples and tutorials and leave the videos for marketing. . . . .

I know we're not alone on this. . . . .

# ChuckBaker11 said on 24 May, 2008 11:02 AM

Re: The comment from Videos...:  I hear what you're saying about videos not being searchable and yes, I'm occasionally frustrated by not being able to get to the info that I'm looking for within a video very quickly  !!! BUT  !! the info that a video presents very very often shows far more than the topic under discussion and THAT is the information that is exceedingly valuable to be. When I'm learning something new, I haven't got a clue what is possible so I couldn't look for it in ANY book.  On purpose or as a side benefit, the video shows the environment and subtle details of how-to that would take weeks of experiments and fiddling about to figure out for myself.

Thanks Jesse, please keep the videos coming and I'm looking forward to your book.

Chuck

# jesseliberty said on 24 May, 2008 11:44 AM

>>It is the opinion of my coworkers and I that video tutorials are all a HUGE waste.<<

First, and this is not sarcasm at all, thanks for taking the risk of being very open and direct. That is what it takes to help us figure out what is needed.

Second, you'll be happy to know that we are in the process of creating just what you are asking for, and much of it is already available.  I have a series of tutorails availalable here (see the side bar where you can find links to each or go to silverlight.net/learn and I'm in the process of writing Programming Silverlight for O'Reilly as part of my job for Microsoft!  We also have extensive documentation on the way in addition to what is currently available (remember, we're still in Beta).

Years ago my wife asked me why she received a report with a graph and the numbers it was based on. "Why do I need the graph if I have the numbers?"  

"Because," I said, "somewhere someone is asking their spouse 'why do I need the numbers if I have the grapah?'"

-j

# BenHayat said on 24 May, 2008 01:15 PM

>>"Because," I said, "somewhere someone is asking their spouse 'why do I need the numbers if I have the grapah?'"<<

:-) :-)

..Ben

# BeejCyr said on 25 May, 2008 11:27 AM

Maybe its just the way my limited brain learns, but I find a lot of benefit in video when trying to learn something new.  Once learned, it is handier to have text documentation to flip back to rather than trying to remember which video I saw something in, but there are many places to get that documentation from.  The inital learning is the important part.  I feel that without these videos, I would be WAY behind where I am now. Thank you so much for taking then time out of your schedule and creating these videos.