Microsoft PDC09 and Silverlight Round-up

Well, PDC09 is over and it was a blast.  What a relief it is to finally be able to show the world what the Silverlight team has been working on since Silverlight 3.  Based on the feedback at the conference, people are excited to dig into the new bits and start building solutions. 

As a round-up of resources from PDC, I’m putting some of my favorites here.

Video Content

For some of the PDC09 key Silverlight sessions, these are what I recommend:

• CL01 – Microsoft Silverlight 4 Overview (Karen Corby)
• CL02 – Silverlight 3 Advanced Performance and Profiling (Seema Ramchandani)
• CL06 – Networking and Web Services (Yavor Georgiev)
• CL07 – Mastering WCF RIA Services (Dinesh Kulkarni)
• CL19 – Building Line of Business Applications with Silverlight 4 (David Poll)
• CL20 – Improving and Extending the Sandbox with Silverlight 4 (Joe Stegman)
• CL21 – Building Line of Business Applications with Silverlight and RIA Services (Brad Abrams)
• CL22 – Advanced Topics for Building Large-scale Applications with Silverlight (John Papa)
• CL24 – XAML Futures in Microsoft .NET Framework (Rob Relyea)
• CL32 – Developing Testable Silverlight Applications (Keith Jones)
• CL08 – Custom Behaviors for Advanced Microsoft Silverlight UI Effects (Peter Blois)
• CL36 – Deep Dive on Bing maps Silverlight Control (Keith Kinnan)
• PR03 – Integrate Microsoft Silverlight with SharePoint 2010 (Paul Stubbs)
• FT24 – Building Extensible RIAs with Managed Extensibility Framework (Glenn Block)

These would be my “not miss” ones for Silverlight.  To help you get the videos faster, I’ve cooked up a few helpful links:

• WMV Podcast RSS Feed (for Zune or other WMV players) – this is the WMV hi-res videos
• iTunes/iPod Podcast RSS Feed – this is MP4 format so you can use it for any MP4 player.  As of the writing of this post, the MP4 encoding wasn’t done yet, but if you subscribe here you’ll get them when they are.
• Windows Media Center playlist – want the 10-foot experience?  Here’s a set of playlist files for Windows Media Center.  Unzip the folder in your Public Videos folder for Media Center (or wherever you have your video content discoverable).  These point to the same hi-res videos that you would watch online.

I hope that helps get the most out of the video content for Silverlight.

Blog Content

There was some great blogging going on in the flurry of PDC and Silverlight 4 announcements as well.  Here are some I wanted to ensure you saw:

• (shameless plug) My “Guide to Silverlight 4” post with sample code snippets and links to 17 video/code downloads for the top features released in Silverlight 4
• David Anson’s Silverlight Toolkit for Silverlight 4
• Jeff Wilcox’s walkthrough of the Silverlight Toolkit testing tools
• Jeff Wilcox’s post on BusyIndicator more in depth
• Jesse Bishop’s Implementing a Context Menu Control for Silverlight 4
• Silverlight 4 Security Whitepaper by Nick Kramer
• XAML Toolkit CTP by Michael Shim
• Silverlight 3 & 4 Library Sharing with WPF by Karl Shifflett
• Extensibility Series for WPF/Silverlight design-time by Karl Shifflett (a MUST for control developers)
• Silverlight 4 Podcast Pack from Sparkling Client (Erik Mork)
• Building ContosoSales (WCF RIA Services sample) by Jeff Handley
• Presentation Model in RIA Services by Deepesh Mohnani

These were some of the highlights I wanted to call out.

Learning Resources

In case you missed the links in my guide post to Silverlight 4, there are 17 videos and code downloads that were launched for Silverlight 4.  In addition here’s some other resources:

• 17 videos and code downloads for top features in Silverlight 4 (more to come)
• 6 Hands-on Labs for Silverlight 4
• All about WCF RIA Services and samples

Hopefully this should all get you started.  PDC was great.  Launching Silverlight 4 beta was awesome and I was able to talk to a lot of folks and get even more feedback for our requested features and what people are thinking about them.  Trust me your feedback will make it’s way back to the overall Silverlight team to see how people are using and planning to use the new features!