Splendid attend Microsoft Silverlight Boot Camp

• Sunday 1 January 2006
• posted by Dan Morris
• 0 Comments

Recently we at Splendid were invited to send one of the team to attend a Boot Camp at the Microsoft campus in Redmond in the USA.

The purpose of the Boot camp (named the Artist in Residence Programme) was to to give each resident the ability to implement Silverlight solutions using the Microsoft Expressions Studio, Visual studio and other 3rd party tools such as Illustrator etc.. Silverlight (formerly WPF/e) was officially launched this week at NAB in Vegas.

During Boot Camp each resident worked with a mentor from the Silverlight development team to help them develop the knowledge of the platform. The programme was run by Barak Cohen (Marking product manager of Silverlight), assisted by a number of managers from the Microsoft team including Mike Harsh, Ed Maia, Aaron Brethorst, Mark Rideout, Peter Blois, Celso Gomes and Joe Stegman.

So, what is Silverlight? Silverlight is a cross-browser plug-in, a sub set technology of the WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) . Silverlight uses XAML and Javascript to enable designers and developers to produce rich Web 2.0 user experiences using video, vector based graphics and animations that can be integrated in to existing web based technologies.

During the first few days of the program we were introduced to the different aspects of the Silverlight and Expressions studio Tools. We looked in detail at XAML and it's integration with Javascript and C#. XAML (Extendable Application Mark-up Language) is a text document that describes an applications look and feel and defines position, size and colour of multiple objects.

The expression studio tool set and Visual studio 5 with IntelliSense are designed to enable both designers and developers to work closer together. A designer can use Expression blend to create the visual assets which are immediately translated into XAML (using a logical naming convention) from which point a developer can control the graphics, video text and animation using Javascript.

One of the most interesting aspects of the program was to be involved at a point when the application was still in development. A stated objective of the program is to gather feedback from real users developing application for clients using other software packages (like Flash etc.). We were able to suggest elements that would prove extremely useful to designers and developers and which will hopefully be included in later versions of the software. One of the obvious pitfalls of this is that there are very few experts of Silverlight and there were many questions asked and bugs encountered.

As well as learning some really interesting stuff about Silverlight and it's capabilities we also met some cool guys from the Microsoft team and from the other companies participating including Elor and Rudi from Metacafe, Michael from McCann, Hiljamaria from Conchango, Mike from MondoRobot and Maya from Eyeblaster and of course everyone else from Render space, and AKQA.

It was a great opportunity to work within such a diverse group of designers and developers all with varying levels of ability. We also had a great day out skiing during the trip. Nice.

For more information on what we are doing with Skinkers and other projects using Microsoft Silverlight please contact dan@howsplendid.com