I attended a Silverlight 2 presentation this evening hosted by SA Developer .Net and Brad Abrams, the Group Program Manager for the UI Framework and Services Team at Microsoft in Seattle.
Brad kicked off the presentation with an overview of Silverlight 2 and some of the new features that will be included in the RTM version to be released later this year. He then moved onto a demonstration of a few really amazing implementations of the new version. I really enjoyed the Microsoft Health Common User Interface demo which was the most relevant to the type of software applications we build.
Once we had seen all of the user interface demos, we then got down to the more technical side of things as Brad showed us the versatility of Silverlight 2 by building a simple data access application that relied on a WCF Service and LINQ to SQL for data retrieval and modifications.
Silverlight 2 controls are unable to access a database directly and do not have any data access attributes, hence the need for a proxy for data access. Another important aspect to remember when building applications using Silverlight 2 is that all service calls made by Silverlight 2 are asynchronous and need to be handled accordingly.
I am really looking forward to using the various types of Silverlight controls that have been included in the next release of the Silverlight series, they really make web based applications look great and give them desktop like functionality.
It was really great meeting Brad Abrams and catching up with developers and friends from the community and I am already looking forward to the next event which is at Monte Casino tomorrow with Brad Abrams at Mix Essentials.
July 7, 2008 at 7:22 am
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