Digital Thoughts @ Wesstyware

Mark your calendar everyone, because tonight marked the first meeting of the Winnipeg Silverlight User Group, and I must say that the night was an evening to remember. The group was started by D’Arcy Lussier, a well known member of the .NET community.

Atmosphere

The atmosphere for the evening is shat made the event different than others I have attended in the past. The plan wasn’t to have formal presentations followed by Q & A, but to have discussions led by real Silverlight developers followed up by conversations between the attendees. Tonight there were two discussions, the first lead by me and the second by D’Arcy.

Discussions

My discussion revolved around the work I have been doing with SketchFlow with a project I plan on formally announcing on my blog and website in the upcoming week. To give you a brief summary on what I spoke about, it concerns how I use the different features of SketchFlow to gather requirements, prototype, and receive feedback from stakeholders for ASP.NET 3.5 and jQuery web applications. (Thing to note: I don’t use Silverlight in my work projects).

D’Arcy picked up the group after me showing us how Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 was supporting Silverlight 3, including the brand new designer component for Silverlight (which was unavailable up until now). This also lead into a conversation with Dylan Smith about RIA Services and what they can do for Silverlight applications.

Conclusion

All in all, it was a fantastic evening with great conversations about conferences, technology, and all sorts of fun. I strongly suggest that more people come to the next meeting whether you are a Silverlight pro or you just know a bit about it. These meetings are your chance to take part in conversations and ask your questions one-on-one with real Silverlight people.

For more information, watch the user group websiteor drop me (david dot wesst at wesstyware.com) or D’Arcy a line and we’ll be sure to send you some info.

Catch you on the flip side.

SIDE NOTE: I realize that I haven’t posted in a long time, but I have been working on some new things and I assure you that some interesting content is coming your way in the next couple of weeks.

Stay tuned! It will be worth it, I promise!

If you haven’t been following Mix 2009 that went down in Las Vegas last week, then you haven’t heard that the Silverlight 3 beta has been officially released to the public. Although your "standard" Internet user may not have a serious interest in the new version of Silverlight, as an RIA developer I am exceptionally excited. The features that are to be included in this release finally give Silverlight the power it needs to take on the powerhouse of Flash/Flex. I have missed working in Silverlight 2 for the past many months at work, but with Silverlight 3 finally being available for me to play with, it has awoken Silverlight beast that rested dormant inside of my digital soul.

If you are interested in getting started on learning about this technology, or even better, start a little software development you should start at the source which is the Microsoft community site, Silverlight.NET. I haven’t been visiting as much as I once did, but be sure that you will probably see me wondering the forums a little more often in the upcoming weeks.

With the Silverlight coming alive inside of me and spring creeping up, I have decided to update my personal development environment on my laptop where I author the amazing content you find in my blog. I figure as I will be talking about software development some of the time, it makes sense to share my development environment with the all of you. This list covers all the development software and tools that I will have installed by tomorrow morning.

• Windows 7 Ultimate (Beta)
• Visual Studio 2008 Professional SP1
• Expression
  • Blend 2 SP1
  • Web 2
• Silverlight 3 Beta
  • Silverlight 3 Beta Tools for Visual Studio
  • Silverlight Toolkit March 2009
  • Blend 3 Preview
  • .NET RIA Services (very cool RIA development component)
• Gimp 2.6

I realize that using Windows 7 might be a bit of a risk in terms of development as it is only in beta. I have heard good things about the stability of the Windows 7 beta, so I figure why not. The plan is to clean off the laptop and see if I can get all my hardware drivers working properly before I start installing the rest of the software. If this fails then I will just return to using my good old Vista Business with SP1.

With Silverlight 3 being released, Microsoft has also released a preview of .NET RIA Services which, I admit, had a very interesting sounding name but as I hadn’t heard anything of the sort prior to Mix, I wasn’t overly excited. After reading a bit of the lab posted at Silverlight.NET, my feelings changed drastically. From what I can gather, all the difficulties our team needed to overcome in Silverlight 2 seem to be resolved thanks to .NET RIA Services. I think this can really round out Silverlight as a solid development platform, and would suggest that any and all Silverlight developers utilize it ASAP.

The last tool you might be wondering about is the Gimp 2.6. For anyone that has worked with UI development, or with a design team, you should know that you will need to play around with graphics at some point when you are building that UI. As I do not require all the features that comes with Adobe CS4, or Microsoft Design, I use the Gimp because it is free and it has all the tools I need for the image manipulation that I do in my projects. For anyone who likes to play around with images, whether it be for UI development or just playing around with digital photos, I would recommend giving it a try.

I am exceptionally excited to get everything working and to get myself back into the Silverlight stream of things. There is more work to be done before I can start creating partitions, which is what I am going to do right now.

Catch you on the flip side.