What is coming soon?
You have noticed, I’m sure, that there has been a flurry of blogging, videos and more since the release of Beta 2. That is all goodness, though it can be hard to know where to start; and the road map will differ depending on where you are in your experience with Silverlight.
This is a rapidly changing environment and I’m hesitant to make promises, because things can change, but after some thought I’ve decided that it would be helpful to give you an idea of what to expect with my tutorials, videos and webcasts. So, here is my tentative schedule through the next couple months.
WebCasts
Tutorials
All of the tutorials are updated to Beta 2 in their pdf form and the HTML will be updated very soon. All of the source code is already updated. The next couple tutorials will include
- Styles, Templates, the Visual State Manager
- Graphics, Transforms, and Animation
- Animation In Detail
- The DataGrid in Detail
Book
Tim and I are working hard to write and publish Programming Silverlight 2. Our hope is to be able to provide an early look very soon. Here is one paragraph from my non-introduction (unedited and unauthorized)
We’ve set out to tell you the story of Silverlight and to teach you everything you need to know to program effectively with what we believe is an amazing new technology.
We have not tried to replicate the documentation nor to provide a comprehensive definition of every property, event and method of the framework. But telling the story of Silverlight is more than just picking which parts are most important; it is threading our way through a very large and complex framework in a coherent and logical way, making sense of it, and providing a guided tour through the underbrush pointing out the dangerous spots, showing the shortcuts, and warning of the dead-ends.
How Do I Videos
In addition to the many videos already posted it is my plan to create videos on the following topics in the coming weeks.
- Styles
- Templates and Visual State Manager
- The Visual State Manager In Depth
- Basic Animation in Beta 2 (with Blend)
- Inter-state animation
- In-state Animation
- Graphics and transforms
- Animating objects
- Data and Animation
- DataGrid
- Advanced DataGrid
- Popup Control
- Calendar Control
- TextBox In Depth
- Scroll Bars
If your favorite topic is missing, just drop me a note. Please note that some of these topics are covered already, but, in my opinion, more from a designer perspective than a developer perspective. I intend to focus on all these topics entirely from the perspective of the working developer.