Getting started with Silverlight 2

Now that beta 2 is out and some of the features or more solid, and a majority of the breaking changes have been announced, there is no excuse to hold back anymore.  Oh yeah, and there is a commercial go-live license available now, so no more excuses :-).

So where to get started?  Well you should first head over to the Silverlight community site and visit the Get Started section.  There you will find a rather simple formula to get started:

• Download/install the tools
• Watch a quick video (13 minutes) walking through the tools and getting started on your first app
• Read some blog posts
• Watch some videos on different features (7 new ones for Beta 2)
• Subscribe to some excellent bloggers:
  • Well, I hope you’ll subscribe here.
  • Silverlight Community Feed

The community feed includes some great folks like Pete Brown, Shawn Wildermuth, Dave Campbell just to name a few.  As an example…all things ADO.NET Data Services (and with Silverlight): Shawn is your man right now.  I was thinking about giving him a hard time about his “ADO Guy” moniker…but he’s holding true to it for now :-).

The Learn section of the Silverlight community site is intended to help you.  Watch the videos, download the source code, read the tutorials, try the hands-on-labs (thanks Hanu!), post feedback – and post here what you want to see.  We have a lot in production right now that will be filtering over the next weeks (including some “Silverlight for Business” content) so be sure to stay posted (and subscribed for auto updates).

Once you’ve created that masterpiece, be sure to let us know about it!