A hands-on workshop about Silverlight 2.0.
The many MacBooks that are available are probably set up for the Air session this afternoon. Our speaker informs us "We wont be using those", quickly followed by "Silverlight is a cross platform …".
Blend has loads of panels and properties. Nesting controls is possible. You can have a video inside a button.
Changes in Blend are detected in Visual studio. It helps to do a rebuild in Blend to make shure Visual studio isn’t working on an old version. Design view isn’t fully supported there yet. Double clicking on a button doesn’t get you a onClick handler yet.
Silverlight uses layout managers like Flex. Buttons have a content property which enables design and programming to be done separately. You can create some kind of color palette of Brush Resources in Blend which translates to SolidColorBrush elements in XAML. Visual studio has intellisence for XAML which makes it easier to type in there than in Blend. Fullscreen is supported but must be initiated by the user. Controls have a background and a border while other elements have a fill and a stroke. Blend has some glitches when setting properties on multiple controls. Switching to XAML code is the normal reaction to that. Not shure how designers will react to that. Hope these things are fixed when it goes out of beta.
The presentation was quite good, but I’m not sure weather I’m going to dump flash for this.