Day five picks up with unsolicited errata and general notes for the remaining Quick Start tutorials from the Silverlight.net site.

Notes to Interaction Between HTML and Managed Code (there is only one tutorial in this section, as of this writing):

Accessing the HTML DOM from Managed Code -- This is a pleasant tutorial showing how to use the Silverlight Host Control as basically a wedge between code behind and the HTML DOM.  From the user control hosted in the host page, you can basically grab the DOM of the container page and manipulate it.  Because there is a lot of code, this is primarily a copy & paste style of tutorial, which means some useful information is left out.  For instance:

• If you name your Silverlight project qsHB, the code will work better, depending on how much you copy & paste and how much you write by hand.
• The HTML controls you add to the Test html page should go in the same div tag that contains the Silverlight Host object.
• By default, the dimensions of the Test html page generated with your project are 100% by 100%.  Change this to 10% by 10%, otherwise your controls will be off the bottom of the browser window.

Notes to Programming with Dynamic Languages (this section only has one eponymous Quick Start):

Notes to Programming with Dynamic Languages: [Skipped] -- some day I may want to learn managed JavaScript, IronPython, or IronRuby.  Right now, however, I can't really see the point.

Notes to Additional Programming Tasks (includes one Quick Start):

Using Isolated Storage and Application Settings -- This tutorial walks you through working with the System.IO.IsolatedStorage.IsolatedStorageFileStream, which allows the application to store files in a sandbox on the server.  The application is very rich, which unfortunately means the tutorial itself involves a lot of copy -- paste -- compile.  To understand what is going on, you basically need to read through all the code you copy & pasted after it is all done.  When a tutorial becomes this complex (and to my chagrin I have written a few like that) it is perhaps best to give up on the idea of doing a tutorial and actually do a "lab", in which the code is already all written out, and the author's job is merely to walk the reader through what is going on.  This is a cool little application, all the same, and I foresee using it as a reference app for lots of future projects.

Whew.  That's it for the Quick Starts found on http://silverlight.net.  Tomorrow I'll start on the labs.

Day Three concluded with finishing the QuickStart series on Building Dynamic User Interfaces with Silverlight, from the official Silverlight website.  Day Four continues with notes and unsolicited errata on Networking and Communication in Silverlight.

A. Sending and Receiving Plain XML Messages with Silverlight -- I learned a new acronym in this very brief tutorial.  POX stands for plain ol' XML.  The System.Net.WebClient class allows us to call a web service (in this case, a DIGG service) and pass the results to a callback method.

B. Building a WCF Web Service and Accessing It by Using a Proxy -- Very nice.  A somewhat sophisticated small application combining Silverlight and WCF, explained clearly.  Someone went through and proofread this particular walkthrough, and the effort shows even in the details -- like stating what namespaces need to be referenced before one actually needs to use them.

C. Accessing Syndication Feeds with Silverlight -- Very simple tutorial on how to access an rss feed in Silverlight using the System.ServiceModel.Syndication.SyndicationFeed class.  The only problem is that if you follow the instructions precisely, it will not work.  The sample code uses the Silverlight.net rss feed, http://silverlight.net/blogs/microsoft/rss.aspx, as its source.  Unfortunately, in order to access an rss feed, the server hosting the feed must have a policy file set up to allow cross-domain access, which the Silverlight.net rss feed does not.

A tad annoying, no?  Or perhaps this is a some sort of Zen exercise intended to reinforce the principle that a Clientaccesspolicy.xml or Crossdomain.xml file must always be properly configured on the feed server. 

Today I have been working through the Microsoft QuickStarts for Silverlight, which include walkthroughs as well as code source.  Here are the high level topics available:

E. Working with Data Collections in Silverlight -- this useful QuickStart explains data binding and the DataTemplate.  No obvious errors, but a few lacunae.

• Life will go much easier if you name your project Quickstart_Bookstore.
• The ObservableCollection type belongs to the namespace System.Collections.ObjectModel.

Today I finished reading through Christian Wenz's Essential Silverlight Up-To-Date.  According to Amazon, the book ships tomorrow -- I was able to read it though my subscription to Safari Books Online.  From what I can get out of browsing the Amazon site, it is the first Silverlight 2 book to come out, and precedes the others by about two months.  It is, essentially, the only game in town for those planning to learn Silverlight 2 from a book.

It is a bit of a mixed bag, due not least to the difficulties involved in trying to write a book about a technology that is still in flux.  Breaking changes are expected during the transition from the beta 1 to the beta 2 of  Silverlight 2, and most book authors in this sub-genre of a sub-genre have adopted the better part of valor.  So thanks are due to Mr. Wenz for accepting such a difficult task and finding a way to meet his publisher's deadline.

That said, while the book offers a good overview of the Silverlight 2 technology, in doesn't go into any particular depth.  The labs are difficult to follow, at times, because some of the things he writes about do not appear in the Silverlight 2 beta 1, such as a project template for user controls.  Since his walkthroughs require the use of a user control, I was obliged to google the right way to create one, just so I could finish the book.

Frustratingly, the chapter on Programming Silverlight with .NET is extremely brief, despite the fact that this is perhaps the most interesting new feature of Silverlight 2.  Or perhaps this is merely an artifact of the way I read it, and the physical copy that will be placed on bookstore shelves will have more content.  At least I hope this is the case.

I was finally able to get a user control into my XAML page by following the official Silverlight 2 hands-on labs, found here.  Microsoft is not known for being good at documenting their bleeding edge technology, but these labs are actually quite excellent, and may currently be the best resource for learning Silverlight 2.  I'll know more tomorrow, as I plan to work my way through all the tutorials and labs on the official Silverlight site.

The trick with adding a user control to a XAML page, it turns out, is that a namespace declaration to the containing project has to be added to the page.  The page, for whatever reason, is not automatically aware of the assembly it is in.  Once the namespace is declared, however, Intellisense takes over and makes adding your user controls -- HelloWorld.xaml, in this case -- quite easy.

'Twas not a propitious day.  Installing the Beta 1 of Silverlight 2 was trying.  Finding the correct place to download the correct version of Silverlight 2 was a bit tricky, but I finally did get to it: http://silverlight.net/getstarted/.

I downloaded and installed the SDK without trouble.  On reading a bit more around the net, it turned out I also needed the correct version of the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 in order to get the project templates I would require to do anything worthwhile, so I did.  This installation didn't go so well, and I received a message stating vaguely that I had previous software that needed to be removed.

I removed the Silverlight browser plug-in, but I got the same message.  Since the only other Silverlight component I had installed was the SDK, I decided to remove that also.  This did the trick.  It turns out that what is now being called the Silverlight Tools is actually a comprehensive install that includes the SDK, though at some previous point it wasn't.  Checking at the Microsoft Silverlight site, it also appears that the site has been updated with a clarification to make this change more obvious.

After getting everything installed, I fired up the Visual Studio IDE and started working through the examples in Chris Wenz's Essential Silverlight 2 -- Up to Date.  It is the only book on Silverlight 2 I could find, and the "Up to Date" postscript is meant to indicate that it will be updated on a regular basis as different versions of Silverlight are released.  The one I'm reading through is meant to be for the Silverlight 2 Beta 1, though the version being sold appears to have been written before the official release.  I was also told that this was the book which was distributed at MIX '08.

I tried downloading the sample code that is intended to go with the book, but it turned out to be a dead link.   Oh well, I thought, I can just build each project myself according to Chris's instructions.

At the end of the first chapter, however, I was instructed to create "a new Silverlight Control project within the current solution," and after 20 minutes or so trying to puzzle out what I was supposed to do, I finally realized that no such project template existed.  The version of the Silverlight 2 Beta 1 that was released turns out to be a different beast than the one he was writing about.  So I'll just skip this example and move on to the rest of the book, hoping that this is the exception that proves the rule, rather than the rule that proves the rule.

In this first chapter, I also learned a new acronym to add to my bestiary of strange and exotic technical terms.  An RIA is a Rich Internet Application, not to be confused with an AJAX client, or a thin client, or a one-click client, or a rich client application.  Silverlight is an RIA, as is Adobe Flash, Adobe AIR, JavaFX and Google Gears.

Despite the frustrations of this first day, I am still excited about Silverlight.  The contradictory and confusing nature of the various Silverlight resources can be chalked up to the entry cost for learning bleeding edge technology.  And perhaps it is even intended to discourage those not willing to bear some burden as the price for acquiring new knowledge. 

On another front, I've decided that the best place to renew a study of Husserlian Phenomenology is with Franz Brentano.  I have a translation (which you can read here) by Benito Müller of a series of lectures given by Brentano on descriptive psychology from 1890 entitled Psychognosie, which include Brentano's influential analysis of the concept of intentionality -- the sine qua non of phenomenology. 

In his introduction, Müller is good enough to provide the most succinct explanation of intentionality I have ever come across. "Every psychical act is intentional in that it is directed upon an object."  Would that tech book authors could achieve a similar standard of clarity.