Jeff Prosise Lights up Silverlight at ETNUG

Last night at our monthly meeting of ETNUG, Jeff Prosise walked us through the basics of Silverlight and demonstrated some of the potential of this new web platform.  I had read plenty of blog posts about Silverlight, but this was the first demo from scratch that I had seen.

Jeff is a Knoxville area resident, and a model airplane buff.  He showed a Silverlight streaming video of his new model jet that he’s learning to fly.  Who knew you needed a license to fly a model airplane.  His initial demo was of a video website that he called “Foo Tube.” 😉

Jeff showed us his MyComix site and his implementation of the Game of Life, Silverlife.  He also walked us through starting a new Silverlight project in both Visual Studio 2005 and 2008.  Jeff is no fan of JavaScript, to put it mildly, and he was particularly excited to show the use of C# for code behind Silverlight events.

While I was disappointed that he didn’t get into the dynamic language runtime in detail, Jeff talked for a solid ninety content-packed minutes.  I always enjoy watching Jeff present on any topic, but he was particularly excited about the possibilities enabled by Silverlight.

Jeff’s enthusiasm definitely rubbed off on me.  I can’t wait to explore the next release of Silverlight 1.1 which Jeff said will be available “Real Soon Now.”  I am especially interested in using the DLR with Linq in a Silverlight app.

Cheers,

++Alan