Silverlight 2 Beta 1 - End-to-End Hands-On Lab

The Microsoft Switzerland DPE Team yesterday ran an all-day hands-on lab on the subject of Silverlight 2 Beta 1 in Zürich. This blog post's purpose in life is to share the lab with you in case you want to try it for yourself to quickly get started with Silverlight 2.

Goal of the lab was to build a full featured Silverlight application from scratch that acts as a rich, interactive data-driven car-finder application, based on the Comparis Silverlight Challenge sample solution. This challenge runs until June 22, 2008 and will award the best Silverlight solution that implement new and creative ways to use a RIA to visualize automobile advertisements.

The lab can be perfectly run without taking part in the challenge, but gives a great start to everyone looking to get up to speed quickly and to build a solution and participate in the competition.

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The finished Silverlight CarFinder application built in the hands-on lab.

The lab itself consist of a 50 page document, explaining everything from installing the Silverlight SDK on your computer to building the entire application, step by step and a sample solution containing the necessary sample-data and web services.

The lab teaches the use of Expression Blend 2.5 from ground up to create Silverlight 2 XAML user interfaces, build custom controls and create skins and templates for the controls. Visual Studio 2008 is then used to create the C#-based application-logic, consume the WCF based web services and data-bind them to the Silverlight user interface.

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The English version of the complete lab as well as the slides and the demo code that we presented before the lab can now be downloaded from the Swiss MSDN Site or via the following direct links:

 

Enjoy!