Silverlight Firestarter Event

I am attending the Firestarter conference/seminar/introduction live…online; maybe next time I’ll be in Seattle.  I’ll try to keep updating this post as it goes on…

Scott Guthrie walks through a number of new Silverlight features, much as been out for a while, but some new nuggets in there too.  Really liking the tooling support that will come into play in Visual Studio 2010.

Along with the recent CDN and Doloto announcements, there are some exciting things coming soon.  I’m hoping they drop a bomb today and rock the .Net community.

Tim Heuer walks through a ton of key scenarios for Silverlight.

Great sample with multitouch, but I really wish this was a deeper level dive with better view of the SDK/libraries for this.

Big focus today on sandboxing, security.  Isolated storage overview: crypto APIs are available, don’t store the family jewels in isolated storage.

Adam Kinney doing a walkthrough of some real, but not terribly LOB-related, design scenarios.  The resourcing of brushes will be good for those not exposed to it previously.  Showing off some of the property editors available in the new bits.

Lol…Adam’s laptop just froze while presenting, making some good jokes and prodding his boss for a new laptop…

A good walkthough and a 10,000 foot view on how template binding comes into play…now onto some animations in Blend 3.  Showing off the easing functions now.

…also showing how you can animate the content presenter independent of the other animations:

Moving quicker now, getting into data binding, showing how live template editing is reflected as you work in Blend 3.

More complex data binding scenario with sort-of parent-child working with datalist and grid.

Good stuff coming now…working towards behaviours with a lemonade sample.  Some behaviours come packed in Blend, some online in gallery, or write your own.

Behaviours are a combination of triggers and storyboard actions. Some come loaded with properties, some are very basic (like drag drop behaviour).  Here’s a cup with a bunch of behaviours (you’ll have to see the downloadable content in a week or so to see what happens. Hint: cheeziness)

Sample running with keyboard-altering states, one cup of lemonade already drank.  Drunk?

Fielding questions now…good interoperability between some of the external design tools like Expression Design, Photoshop, etc, but no two-way support.  Once the file comes in, it’s in ‘one way’, and if it changes externally it will be destructive when re-importing. 

I would further suggest, however, that if you’re smart about how you import you would position your assets in resource dictionaries and build up code/animations around those resources instead of directly against what you import.

…session break…

TweetTalk right now is shaping up for a Firestarter on Azure, the cloud computing initiative from MS.  That would be a treat.