A Successful Expression Blend and Silverlight Training in Denver

We just completed an 2-1/2 day Expression Blend and Silverlight training course in Denver for some of our communications sector customers and really saw some eyes light up.  Our intention was to give our customers some hands-on experience with Expression Blend and Silverlight.  The majority of students in the course were software developers (there were a few designers as well) and they really had fun with Expression Blend - using a part of their brain that they hadn't exercised in a while.  The fun thing about using Expression Blend is that by its nature, you get visual feedback very quickly and there's something about the hand-eye-design surface feedback loop that's necessary for creative exploration.  When I was in architecture school, my drawing professor Kirby Lockard talked (and wrote) about a similar hand-eye-paper feedback loop.  There's something very satisfying about developing visual applications.  We had two days of training on Expression Blend and Silverlight and then a half-day discussion about Silverlight application architecture.  My colleague Joe Hofstader and I lead the architectural discussion and hit topics like AJAX patterns with Silverlight, WCF Web services, ASP.Net Futures, and encoding formats.