PDC Day 2 – Silverlight 4

Article
11/20/2009

If Windows Azure was the big topic on day 1 of the PDC conference in LA. For me Silverlight 4 was certainly the big topic of day 2.

Scott Guthrie introduced Silverlight 4 during the keynote and showed some of the enhancements that are being introduced to the new version of the platform.

Tim Heuer has done a great job blogging Silverlight 4 Beta – A complete guide to the new features this blog post includes all the tools you need to download to build on Silverlight 4 so I recommend you start there.

In addition to this a number of other resources have been made available as well during PDC:

Channel 9 Launched a Silverlight 4 Training Course

The Silverlight 4 Training Course includes hands-on-labs, a video and a whitepaper designed to help you learn about the new features in Silverlight 4 focusing on three major areas: Enabling Business Application Development, Empowering Richer Experiences and Moving Beyond the Browser.

Also Channel 9 has published a video Rundown of Silverlight 4 Beta

Key Tweets from @follesoe:

I think today will go down in history as the date Silverlight goes mainstream for majority of .NET devs holding off. #pdc09 - 10:03 AM Nov 18th

Share assemblies without separate compile step between SL4 and .NET 4. Great for Silverlight 4 #TDD and #MVVM. #pdc09 - 9:48 AM Nov 18th

Another key area of interest for me is the enhancements in IIS Media streaming technology. During the keynote Scott (attempted) to preview a sneak peak of publishing smooth streaming video content from IIS to an iphone leveraging the HTML 5 <video/> tag.

If you have an iphone you can try for yourself by visiting https://iis.net/iphone there is more detail about the advancements in the IIS media services in Vishal Sood’s PDC session Building Live Media Viewing Experiences Using Internet Information Services (IIS) Smooth Streaming and the Smooth Streaming Player SDK.

Also Karen Corby did a great job presenting an Overview of Silverlight 4 session at PDC (video).

There are lots of Silverlight related session available for download now. Some highlights include:

CL06
Networking and Web Services in Silverlight
Yavor Georgiev
WMV
WMVHigh
Slides

CL07
Mastering Microsoft .NET RIA Services
Dinesh Kulkarni
WMV
WMVHigh
Slides

CL35
Custom Behaviors for Advanced Microsoft Silverlight UI Effects
Peter Blois
WMV
WMVHigh
Slides

CL19
NEW: Building Line of Business Applications with Microsoft Silverlight 4
David Poll
WMV
WMVHigh

CL20
NEW: Improving and Extending the Sandbox with Microsoft Silverlight 4
Joe Stegman
WMV
WMVHigh

CL21
Building Amazing Business Applications with Microsoft Silverlight and Microsoft .NET RIA Services
Brad Abrams
WMV
WMVHigh
Slides

CL24
XAML Futures in Microsoft .NET Framework, Microsoft Silverlight and Tools
Michael Shim, Rob Relyea
WMV
WMVHigh
Slides

CL01
NEW TITLE: Microsoft Silverlight 4 Overview
Karen Corby
WMV
WMVHigh
MP4
Slides

CL30
Microsoft Expression Blend 3 for Developers: Tips, Tricks and Best Practices
DoRon Motter
WMV
WMVHigh
Slides