Several friends and associates have been sending me links to Blend resources since my last post on the Silverlight Code – Design Gap.  I would like to thank a few in particular: Corey Schuman, Adam Kinney and Amos Kabaki.

ShineDraw: Amos told me about a site called ShineDraw that has a Flash vs Silverlight Gallery demonstrating how the same effect can be accomplished in Flash and in Silverlight.  Best of all, the examples are downloadable.

Project Rosetta: Both Corey and Adam clued me in to the recent reboot of Project Rosetta.  Project Rosetta is quickly adding content to be the first stop for designers to learn to work with Blend and Silverlight.  There is a rich getting started guide, a guide that helps designers map Flash concepts to Silverlight concepts, and many, many tutorials including an essential introduction on importing Photoshop files into Blend.

Expression Community: Not everyone knows about the forum for Expression Blend developers. It is set up along the same lines as the ASP.NET and Silverlight.NET forums with – clearly – a Blend bent.  There is also an associated gallery for those looking for a bit of inspiration.

If you are aware of additional Blend and Silverlight resources for designers, dear reader, please add them to the comments.

.NET developers tend to love Silverlight because it gives them the ability to write cool applications using programming idioms they are familiar with.  Everything about it screams out cool.  Furthermore, .NET developers do not need to learn Flash to get Flash-like effects.  They can drop into the XAML (good ol’ XML) in Visual Studio and start typing away with Intellisense standing by to help.

Expression Blend is a little trickier.  It is a different idiom and .NET coders have a hard time using it.  All the same, it is not completely alien.  A .NET developer can still drop into the XAML if he wants to, and it is possible to mentally translate between the drag-and-drop designer and the XAML that is produced to the objects one assumes are being generated at runtime.  The bits that are foreign are assumed to be there for designers.

Yet designers have not embraced Expression Blend and finding out why is essential to building an effective Silverlight development story.

Allison Richter recently joined the Silverlight Atlanta User Group.  In her introduction to the group she mentioned that she is a designer who is mastering Silverlight but finding the experience frustrating.  When I asked her about this she did more than simply offer a quick reply.  She wrote an enlightening essay on her website 2foldesign explaining the gap between designers and Silverlight coders.  You can read the entire essay here (the speaker she refers to near the bottom is Roger Peters, a lead Silverlight developer for IQ Interactive):

Reasons why designers may not be seeking a change to Silverlight could be that code is not necessarily their passion. Code is what allows them to place their design into a workable format. Kind of like when I paint, I may need to know how to stretch a canvas onto a frame so I can paint, but I do not love doing so. So code is a necessity, but not a passion. Most developers I know love to code. They love new code, new solutions. They would just as easily go home and work on the computer all night after coding all day for enjoyment. Designers want to pursue what they enjoy: design. Painting, drawing, logos, ID, branding. I know personally I'll lay out $20 per mag for things like a new Image FX without a second thought to see what other people are doing. Yet I may not go out and research a new code language with as much zeal.

On the question of frustration, there are many many areas so I will name a few.

Blend/Silverlight creates a dependency. True, most applications will need a developer to work in concert with the designer to create a dynamic amazing product. I also recognize that Flash does not have the capabilities that Silverlight has. However first off when using Blend and Silverlight I had to be set up. This is off-putting to many designers. We want something we can do ourselves. Adobe has it’s products packaged up nicely and all we have to do is load. My developer had to help sift through the right files, work with dlls, set up my environment etc. I have all of my Expression software loaded, my Visual Studio hooked up, the toolkit downloaded etc. If I had started out on my own as a designer I would have already been lost. When I create with Flash, it’s one product in which I already know how to create everything I need to create, then drop what is published into my HTML and CSS …

My expectations before I started with Blend and XAML was that Silverlight would be like Flash. The Blend software itself is very unlike Flash in many ways. I would relate it more to ASP.NET than I would to Flash. The toolkit, the way you code in the XAML, the types of containers that you apply. These seem to be very much like ASP.NET …

The toolkit controls are difficult to edit. I will go and watch as many videos as I can before trying to create what I want. For example, I need to create an accordion. Yes, there is a tool for that. Yes, you can learn how to edit it. Most of the videos don’t explain all the parts of the XAML, they assume that you will just use the properties area in Blend. Then they jump to the code behind and start doing things that I would need my developer to do. So then I come to a grinding halt …

[Terminology] is misleading. From a designer standpoint things like border mean a tiny thin line. You learn to put colored borders on all your divs/spans … to see what you are doing in CSS. So now I’m created entire blocks of items within a border? A border has a background? It’s not familiar to a designer. This makes the comparison between what we know already and what the new code is maddening …

There is no one to ask. Most of the places I have worked after college, I am the only designer. Other designers do not want to work with new technologies. The old ones cater to the right side of the brain, so to speak. They know how to use these programs, and time is money. The forums, information, videos seem mostly to be for developers. As the speaker from last night said, there is no elusive Blend designer with a background in Flash – good luck finding one. You guys [coders] can pool your resources together and talk about what to do and how you got there, but there is not a large resource of people for me to ask.

A few years ago I posted a list of technological similes on this blog involving the term “Ajax” which I aggregated from a Google Search.  You can read about it here.

It occurred to me that a similar search of similes involving the term “Silverlight” might be equally fruitful, much like throwing a fishing net into a sewer and seeing what comes back.  Voila the results:

“Silverlight is like a little baby.”

“Silverlight is like Flash.”

“Silverlight is like Flash … only different.”

“Comparing Flex to Silverlight is like comparing apples and oranges.”

“Silverlight is like all choppy and slow which slow down my browser like hell.”

“Silverlight is like ajax and Flex.”

“Silverlight is like a lightweight version of WPF…”

“Silverlight is like a browser add-on that can understand XMAL code.”

"Silverlight is like OS X.”

“At a time like this, finding an article written as recently as Feb 2009, and listing the strengths of Silverlight, is like finding lots and lots of drinking water when thirsty in a desert.”

"Silverlight is like activex all over again - arghhhhh!"

“In the experience world WPF is the Ferrari, Silverlight is like a Lexus, and Ajax is that Nissan Stanza that your sisters boyfriend bought…”

“Microsoft Silverlight is like the proverbial elephant…”

“After playing with the beta for a few weeks, developing a control in Silverlight is like walking through mud.”

“Using Silverturd instead of Silverlight is like using M$ instead of Microsoft and people who do that are looked down upon.”

“Someone memtioned Silverlight is like Java plugin?”

“I read on one blog that programming with Silverlight is like going camping with .NET.”

“Silverlight is like the wild wild west. Everyone code however they want, Every new discovery is like virgin territory…”

“The easy developing tool provided by Silverlight is like candy to lure developers in and cage them…”

“SilverLight is like Flash on Crack.”

“Silverlight is like the force. It has a light side and a ... uh...... silver side.”

“Silverlight is like an add on. Almost after the fact. I haven't thought it through…”

One of the peculiar things about Silverlight applications is that, while SL provides the tools to create new and interesting user interface paradigms, most Silverlight apps currently being written look like revamped winforms or web form UIs.

This smells like a missed opportunity.  The problem, of course, is that it is difficult to come up with new ways for people to interface with their computers.  Developers and designers tend to fall back on the metaphors they are familiar with.

If you want to find interesting UIs, you need to look at your TV or the movie theater.  Movies like The Minority Report, while even more confusing than the Philip Dick story it is based on, succeeded mostly on its ability to show us what the future would look like.  Shows like the various CSI franchises succeed in making that future look like it is available today.

At the office, we get a big kick out of recounting the latest weird, impossible software being used on last night’s procedural drama to catch the bad guy.  What we rarely examine, however, is the fact that we can use Silverlight to build apps to look like – if not actually function like – those fictional software programs.  So why don’t we?

If we want to find new metaphors for the UI experience, it makes sense to go to the experts – television designers.  They have already done the hard creative work.  All we, as software developers, need to do is copy them and see what actually succeeds. 

So put on your Horatio sun glasses and build something from CSI, or Bones, or Criminal Minds, or The Minority Report, or any other technologically fictional world and see if you can make it real.  And when you are done, you can peer over your shades and drop a cheesy line like “Looks like his XAML finally got rendered.”

http://www.meetup.com/The-Atlanta-Silverlight-Meetup-Group/

http://www.silverlightatlanta.net

Following the morning release of a Silverlight 4 beta, Shawn Wildermuth switched gears and spoke for 70 minutes about the new Silverlight 4 features at last night’s Atlanta Silverlight Meetup. He was originally scheduled to speak on Line of Business applications, but based on a show-of-hands decided to give this much more timely presentation.

The cellar of 5 Seasons Brewery was packed for the event and there was standing room only in the back. Because of the NDA, it appears that the Atlanta Silverlight Meetup got to see the first full presentation on Silverlight 4 outside of Redmond and Los Angeles, thanks to Shawn.

Corey Schuman, Roger Peters and Mason Brown – whom many of you met at the Atlanta Silverlight Firestarter – have been under wraps for several months working on a project for IQ Interactive they repeatedly insisted they couldn’t tell me about.

Now that the beta of My Health Info on MSN has been published, not only do I finally get to see what they have been working on but I also get to share it with you.

My Health Info is an aggregator of sorts for personal medical information – a tool to help the user keep track of her personal medical history.  Unlike other portals that support widgets, however, this one is built using Silverlight.

My Health Info is an interesting alternative to the Ajax-based web portal solutions we typically see and serves as a good starting point for anyone looking to combine the “portal” concept with Silverlight technology.  The Silverlight animations as one navigates through the application are especially nice; they strike the appropriate balance between the attractive and the distracting – between cool and cloying.

The ComponentArt Summer Silverlight Coding competition is about to wrap up in a few hours.  It has managed to garner approximately 80 entries – all with publicly accessible Silverlight sites.

In the process of hosting this contest, Miljan Braticevic has achieved a wonderful thing – almost as a side-effect.  He has gathered a fantastic gallery of Silverlight applications which answer the often unvoiced question: What can one actually do with Silverlight?

If you are simply looking for ideas or, more to the point, trying to find a way to explain to your boss what Silverlight is, go here: http://www.componentart.com/community/competition2009/contestants.aspx .

The contest entries run the full gamut of mapping tools, social networking, dashboards, standard web site alternatives and games.

I do not envy the judges the task of bequeathing their golden apples.

With Silverlight 3, Silverlight seems to have reached a critical stage – that is, people are starting to criticize it.  This is a good thing since it means we can now talk about the reality of Silverlight rather than the promise of Silverlight as a technology.

Some recent comparisons have been made between Silverlight and Flash by Michael Lankton as well as Silverlight and HTML + JQuery by Dave Ward, a truly great developer.

One topic that hasn’t been broached, I believe, is the comparison of Silverlight and WPF.  For some die-hard WPF developers I know, Silverlight just seems like a crippled version of the technology they love.  This is somewhat unfair.  Silverlight has definite limitations when compared to WPF; it also, however, is able to reach a much broader audience because it is browser-based and platform neutral.  Until a mono version of WPF is implemented, Silverlight is going to be the main way for .NET developers to get their state-of-the-art applications onto their Mac using friends’ computers.

This reminds me of a comment I heard Derek Jacobi, the great Shakespearean actor, once make to the effect of:

“I do movies for the money.  I do television for the exposure.  But I do theater for love of the craft.”

As much as I have always enjoyed windows development and have cursed the many tricks and hacks one must know to do web development, web development was still always fun because people had a greater appreciation for what one did.  In part this is because web applications simply reach a wider audience.  It is also due, I think, to the fact that users are much more savvy about the web and the way they feel it should look than consumers of desktop applications.

And so those lessons might be applied to how we look at the relationship between Silverlight and WPF.  WPF allows one to practice one’s craft – which is an enjoyable but mostly solitary affair.  Silverlight, on the other hand, provides the developer with exposure for his work – and this is no bad thing. 

There are three Silverlight contests in the month of September.  Each is, interestingly, sponsored by a different set of control vendors.

Due September 14th (link): Telerik Silverlight Contest – Telerik is offering a $500 Amazon gift card for a two page written case study of an application that uses their RadControl suite.  According to the contest announcement, you must:

1. Build an application with the RadControls for Silverlight (you can even use the trials)
2. Create a 1 - 2 page case study describing your project
3. Submit the case study by September 14th, 2009

Due September 19th (link): DevExpress, Infragistics and Telerik are putting up prizes for a contest hosted at www.gosilverlight.org. You must write a Silverlight control to enter the contest. First prize has a combined award of $700 in gift cards as well as licenses for the control suites of each of the sponsors.  The Silverlight Show is also a sponsor.  According to the contest announcement, you must:

1. Controls must be designed to work with Silverlight 2 or later. Silverlight 1 Entries will not be accepted or evaluated.

2. All entries must be received between now and 12:00 AM ET, 9/19/2009 12:00:00 AM. Entries received after this date will not be accepted or evaluated. The deadline may change at any time for any reason.

3. Contestants must provide the control source code as part of the submission. The source code should be provided as a ZIP archive and should include the following items:

• A single Visual Studio 2008 Solution containing each of the solution projects.
• A Silverlight Application project that contains the custom control.
• A Test Silverlight Web Project that will host the Silverlight control. The host web project must demonstrate the control in use.
• The code must compile. If the code does not compile, the entry will not be evaluated.

See the contest rules page for a complete list of instructions.

Due September 22nd (link): ComponentArt is also hosting a Silverlight contest in September for Silverlight applications.  The Grand Prize in this contest is $10,000. 

• The use of ComponentArt products is not required to participate in the Summer Silverlight Coding Competition. The contest is open to the entire Silverlight developer community.

• Each Entry must be a Silverlight 1.0, Silverlight 2.0 or Silverlight 3.0 application. Each Entry must be accessible through a public URL. If authentication is required, a demo username and password must be provided.

• The Entry must not contain any content or material that is obscene, sexually explicit, defamatory, or otherwise inappropriate as determined by ComponentArt at its absolute discretion.

• Each Entrant will be required to provide their full name, email address, physical address, and country of residency.

• ComponentArt employees are not eligible to participate in the Competition.

• Each Entry must be of the Entrant's original creation, created solely by the Entrant(s), must not infringe the copyright, trademark, privacy, publicity, or other intellectual rights of any person or entity.

• Participants using third party libraries, controls and/or code in their application, are required to identify the applicable third party components.

See the contest page for a full list of rules.

I certainly wouldn’t feel comfortable suggesting that anyone slack off from their day jobs for this.  At the same time, however, the incentive has never been better to take a week off and hone your Silverlight skills.

I don’t see any rules that disallow submitting the same basic project for all three contests -- hence tripling your chances of winning something -- so here’s a sample strategy for doing that:

1. Start working on a cool Silverlight app for the ComponentArt contest.

2. Along the way, you will need to build some cool controls.  Take the coolest one and submit it for the gosilverlight.org contest.

3. Rewrite your application using some Telerik controls and submit a write-up for the Telerik Silverlight contest.

If by some chance you manage to win all three September contests, you will have made $11,200 as well as control suites worth an additional $3000 or so.  Really not so bad for a couple of weeks worth of work.

Today’s Silverlight Firestarter in Atlanta was a remarkable event due in large part to the remarkable audience.  We started off with about 110 attendees, and while some left throughout the day, just as many came in to replace them.  By my session, which was the last presentation of the Firestarter, the audience was still enthusiastic and responsive – really amazing considering they’d been receiving a massive Silverlight brain-dump for the past nine hours from some of the best Silverlight developers and architects in Atlanta.

As promised, I am posting the various websites I discussed during my presentation on the Silverlight Ecosystem – the combination of corporate and community resources that make up Silverlight.

Silverlight Control Suites:

The Silverlight Toolkit: http://silverlight.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=24246

SL Extensions and Silverlight Contrib: http://www.slextensions.net

Telerik: http://www.telerik.com/products/silverlight.aspx

Component Art: http://www.componentart.com/

ComponentOne: http://www.componentone.com/

Infragistics: http://www.infragistics.com/

Cellbi: http://www.cellbi.com/default.aspx

DevExpress: http://www.devexpress.com/

Divelements: http://www.divelements.co.uk/silverlight/

FarPoint: http://lab.fpoint.com/inputsilverlight/

Netika Tech: http://www.netikatech.com/products/toolkit

Intersoft: http://www.intersoftpt.com/

Vectorlight: http://www.vectorlight.net/controls.aspx

Visifire: http://visifire.com/

Xceed: http://xceed.com/Upload_Silverlight_Demo.html

Silverlight Book Recommendations:

Pro Silverlight 3 in C# – Matthew MacDonald (Great reference work)

Silverlight 2 in Action – Campbell & Stockton (Excellent beginner’s book)

Foundation Expression Blend 3 with Silverlight - Victor Gaudioso

Foundation Silverlight 3 Animation – Jeff Paries

Data-Driven Services with Silverlight 2 – John Papa

Silverlight Tutorials:

Channel 9

http://silverlight.net/learn/tutorials.aspx

Silverlight Blogs:

The Silverlight Geek (Jesse Liberty)

method ~ of ~ failed (Tim Heuer)

Brad Abrams

Shawn Wildermuth

Jeff Prosise

85 Turns (Corey Schuman)

Dan Wahlin

Adam Kinney

Charles Petzold

Page Brooks

Rob Zelt

Silverlight Forums:

http://silverlight.net/forums/ (You can usually get your SL questions answered within a day, if not within minutes, at the silverlight.net forums)

http://silverlight.net/community/communitygallery.aspx (An excellent place to look for some inspiration)

Free Silverlight Code:

http://www.codeplex.com/site/search?projectSearchText=silverlight

Silverlight Contests:

http://telerikwatch.com/2009/07/telerik-silverlight-contest-win-500.html (Due September 14th)

http://www.componentart.com/community/competition2009/ (Due September 22nd)

I’ve been trying to get Silverlight 2 and Silverlight 3 to run side-by-side on my OS for a while.  Amy Dullard has an interesting set of scripts to facilitate this – in effect, the scripts uninstalls the Silverlight 2 tools and replaces it with Silverlight 3 tools if you want to upswitch, then performs the reverse operation if you want to downswitch from Silverlight 3 to Silverlight 2.

This was time consuming in Windows XP.  It turned out to be impossible for me in Windows 7 (64-bit).  I received one of the mysterious install errors: 0x80070643.

Here are some descriptions of the issues and possible workarounds (which did not work around me):

http://silverlight.net/forums/t/66253.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/rjacobs/archive/2009/01/22/windows-7-and-silverlight-installer.aspx

Fortunately, Windows 7 has the XP Mode feature, which is basically a hardware-based virtualization platform with a license for the Windows XP operating system.

It is an add-on for Windows 7 that must be downloaded.  Thanks to a former Magenic colleague, I have a premier subscription to MSDN.  To run XP Mode, you must install two beta products: Windows Virtual PC beta and Windows XP Mode beta.  These can be downloaded from MSDN Subscriber Downloads |Applications | Windows Virtual PC.

Once I had both of these installed, set up the BIOS to support virtualization, and then installed my development software on the XP image, I found that my host OS now had several interesting new entries on the start menu.

Besides being able to open up my virtual instance of XP, I also can access each application installed on my virtual PC.  Behind the scenes this is still running my virtual machine, but it appears as if I am running an application in a special “XP Mode” since I never have to log into my XP virtual machine and also never see the desktop for it.  Instead, Visual Studio in “XP Mode” simply appears in my Windows 7 task bar next to my Windows 7 instance of Visual Studio.  Furthermore, since I have Silverlight 3 installed on my host OS and Silverlight 2 on the virtual machine, I in effect have a Silverlight 2 instance and a Silverlight 3 instance of Visual Studio running next to each other.

By default, XP Mode runs with 256 Megs of RAM assigned to it.   I had to pump this up to 2 Gigs before I had decent performance.

Here’s a screenshot of the two instances of Visual Studio running side-by-side.  The one on the left has Silverlight 2 running on XP, while the one on the right has Silverlight 3 running on Windows 7.  Notice the lack of glass effects on the left.  I’ve also circled the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio version numbers as proof (partly for myself) that I can develop against two versions of Silverlight at the same time: