For my first day of my 30 day learning sprint focusing on Microsoft Silverlight, I'm going to go through the Quickstarts on the community Silverlight website.

Before starting with the Quickstarts, I had to set my machine up. Based on Scott Hanselman's post "VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 Beta 2 Releases Made Easy," I downloaded and installed the following:

• Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 using Microsoft Secure Content Downloader
  
• Silverlight 1.0 RC.
• Visual Studio Silverlight Tools Alpha.
  
• Expression Blend 2 August Preview.

Then I got confused. I wasn't sure whether to start with 1.0 or 1.1. Silverlight 1.0 is at the release candidate stage with a go live license, so it seems like a safe bet. But with 1.1 I can program with c# on the client. I'm 95% more proficient with c# than with javascript, so this is a tough one.

While digging around for more details, I found Jesse Liberty's blog posts about learning Silverlight from a .NET developer's perspective. Excellent! Not only is there are series with me as a target audience, but one that is a lot like my planned learning exercise, AND it's by the guy who wrote the book that I started my .NET learning with as well!

Jesse's post about the differences between 1.0 and 1.1 lead me to the Silverlight Runtimes Matrix which shed some more light.

I could deal with just using javascript for my initial learning, but when I saw that isolated storage wasn't supported in 1.0 that tipped the scale. I'm not sure exactly why ... it could be because one of the first cool demos I saw of Silverlight was how the isolated storage was shared between all browsers. I found the demo again on ExplosiveDog.com's "Silverlight Isolated Storage" post.

I switched targets and downloaded the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh and Silverlight 1.1 SDK. One thing I'm still confused about is whether the 1.1 SDK is up to date with the 1.1 alpha refresh. I kind of doubt it because the search results on Microsoft Download have it listed with a date of 5/17/2007, while the Silverlight 1.0 SDK RC has a date of 7/27/2007. I decided to hold off on installing the 1.1 SDK, but I'd already installed the 1.0 SDK RC so we'll see what happens.

At this point I've more than used up my first day's amount of time. Maybe later tonight I'll look at some of the samples in the quickstarts, but now my eyes are tired from staring at the monitor for too long. Too bad there aren't any books out yet, because I could really use some printed text at this point.

Labels: silverlight, sprint