The Silverlight Application Corner

One of the things that we have heard in feedback is the need to surface more end-to-end samples.  While the atomic learning videos/samples are great as are more in-depth tutorials, there is still a desire to see how to package all these things up into a single application.  Seeing from start to finish helps absorb the learning process and see how these atomic things fit together and interoperate.

Today we added the “application corner” to the Silverlight community site.  Yes, I know the name is less than exciting, but hey I’m not a super cool marketing person with unlimited imagination!  The goal here is to provide an area with samples of more full-featured applications that put these different practices in implementation as applications.  No, this will not be an area for a multitude of media-only applications, although I think we will show some more full-featured media solutions as some examples.  This is something that I had talked about before in the forums and had been promising to people for a while and what got some people angry at me.  I could expand on the reasons for delays, but won’t as that doesn’t matter.  What matters to me is the initiative has started.

The goal of the Application Corner is to demonstrate various different types of line-of-business applications and techniques.

NOTE: I hate the term “line of business” – isn’t any application to any organization their line-of-business application?

Here’s my plan over the next short-term.  Ideally your feedback will help iterate the longer term:

• AdventureOps – yes, people hate sample databases.  I’m not sure why.  They are full of data, have good relationships defined, etc.  I’m going to use AdventureWorks as the base for the first application (and perhaps more) as it has a good base of data and scenarios.  This first iteration of this application will be an attempt to create a Silverlight front-end dashboard for managing certain data (first just the HR system).  We’ll examine integrating with ASP.NET application services (part 1) and then look at techniques we can do today for page navigation and working with data services (part 2)
• M-V-VM (and other patterns) – seems to be a popular pattern these days and we’ll explore writing an application that uses this pattern in Silverlight and what we can learn from it.  We’ll pull in experts from the community to demonstrate what they’ve done and provide samples.
• Gaming – not on the gambling sense, but in the casual games sense.  What is a game loop, best practices for animation, etc.
• Media – we’ve seen the Olympics, we’ve seen the original “Top Banana” site – how were these done, how can we use media in our applications effectively?
• Continuum – how can you provide some application capabilities for Silverlight and bring them forward to a more full/rich client application?

So that’s the plan.  I know the part 1 of AdventureOps may be old hat to some of you Silverlight pros, but stick with me (and leave feedback).  I look forward to iterating on this section of the site for your benefit.  What do you want to see?

Be sure to subscribe to this blog for updates as the applications get added to the site!