I gave a talk at the Central Ohio Day of .NET last Saturday about Silverlight 2.  The presentation was written in Silverlight 2 Beta 1 and included examples of functionality built into Silverlight versions 1 and 2, and the beginning steps in creating the presentation itself.

I have much more planned to be added to the presentation, so I created a CodePlex project called PresentLight.  I'm hoping that other people will like the idea of giving a presentation in the technology that they're speaking about, and maybe they'll use the framework or even add their own content!

I uploaded a slightly older version than the one I gave at CODoDN to silverlight.live.com, check it out by clicking on the following preview image.  The XAP is 14 MB so expect a decent wait for everything to load ... I need to reduce the size.  I'll update this post with a better example as soon as I have it available.

Much thanks goes out to Jeff Blankenburg for building the original slide deck that I based this presentation on.  Also, I got the idea from David Sleeckx's WPF presentation, which is an excellent way to get an overview of WPF.

Using the Presentation

You can navigate the slides through the menu on the left, or move forward one slide by clicking on the header area.  A few of the slides don't have much at first, but clicking in the slide area will show text which was talking points for that part of the presentation.  The interactive slides in the middle should be pretty self explanatory - you can modify the XAML in most of the examples to see changes in real time.

The screen shots at the end can be clicked on to view the full size.  I wanted to keep the entire presentation in Silverlight, so I was trying to use screen shots instead of jumping into Visual Studio.  These slides were taking over an hour each to prepare, because I was trying to give each one a different type of animation.  I think they ended up being a little disjointed though - its much more natural to see someone working with the environment than seeing screen shots of some code, then the solution explorer, then XAML.  I'm definitely going to have to give more thought to that area.

Plans for the Future

I plan to have the slides stored in data rather than hard coded in the page code behind.  I'm going to integrate more examples, such as Isolated Storage, Communications with web services and through sockets, and dynamic languages integrated directly into the slides, like I did with the XAML examples.

Also, I'm going to expand more on some of the user controls that I created as part of the application.  I already went into the scrolling textbox control in my last post, so there will be more of that on the way.