WPF, Silverlight, Games... Let the journey Begin...

So in a break from my normal SharePoint related posts, I have decided to do something fun as a change of pace. In a previous life I was a Flash Developer trained by Macromedia (before Adobe took over) and spent years working with Flash. At one point I helped to train some of the Design staff at AOL when they first began working with flash to redesign the AOL experience. But since coming to Microsoft in 2005, I have had no contact with any type of design work outside of SharePoint, and especially nothing that would allow me to flex my creativity and design muscles the way that Flash used to. So it is with great excitement that I have been watching our newer UI technologies (WPF, Silverlight) develop over the last year or so.

So now I am ready to give myself a challenge and to have some fun. I am going to dive into WPF and SilverLight and see how I can put the skills I used to use with flash together with my .Net development knowledge and my love of games. What better way to learn a new technology then to write a game with it. I know that I have a ways to go before I am at the point where I should start looking at creating a game, so first I am going to learn the core/basics of WPF for rich UI design, and once I have a solid grounding I will start working on a simple game. I don't know how long it will take or how much of my flash history will be of use, but I will be posting my experiences here. If you have had any similar experiences or are currently going through the same process, feel free to share here, as well as sharing any resources you find useful in your WPF/SilverLight ramp up.

I look forward to hearing from you.