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:
>
Weather
Widget. (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).
>
