Over the holidays, I was finally able to catch up on some reading and take some time to play with Silverlight 1.0. The two books that I spent the most time with are
ASP.NET Ajax in Action and Silverlight 1.0 Unleashed. Both of these, I HIGHLY recommend!
My first project is a Silverlight 1.0 application that I call Weather Widget (for lack of a more exciting moniker). The Weather Widget will accept a 5-digit US Zip Code and return a 5-day forecast from The Weather Channel. You can see it in action here:
WeatherWidget. (Note: This will require the Silverlight 1.0 plug-in).
I also took the time in this project to use (experiment) with a lot of new toys such as:
· LINQ to XML (and the XDocument/XElement classes)
· New C# language enhancements including Automatic Properties, Object Initializers, Implicitly
typed variables, etc.
· Javascript key events – some hard-learned (and forgotten and now painfully re-learned) lessons
to share here
· Integration of ASP.NET Ajax and Silverlight – my implementation here is rudimentary right now as I’m still sorting through the most efficient blending of these two technologies
· Integration of DOM Elements with Silverlight (good post from Keith on that topic here)
· Expression Studio (mostly Blend) – I have much to say about this (some of which you can read in this discussion in Shawn’s comments here). Overall, I really like a lot of things about Blend. I am finding myself there more these days though I miss a lot of things about working in Macromedia (now Adobe) Fireworks (which I have used for MANY years for all of my design work). One upcoming post I’m working on here is “Top 10 Things I miss from Fireworks while working in Blend”.
· Using JSON – I had never used it so now I have
Guess that about covers it. I’ll link back to the above points as I blog about each.
I have several things I’m planning to add (and am open to suggestions), but wanted to get it out there in its current state. Once I am happy with it, I’ll post it to the gallery on the Silverlight.net site.
Let me know if the Widget blows up…at this point, I’ve tested only on IE7 and Firefox on my laptop (Windows Vista64).