• Learning Silverlight (this post)
• Learning Silverlight #1 – where to start
• Learning Silverlight #2 – Tooling Up
• Learning Silverlight #3 – Getting Started
• Learning Silverlight #4 – Sample Project

Anyway, for the first time in who knows how long I have found myself a weekend spare which I am intending to use to do a bit of a Silverlight deep-dive. For anyone reading this not familiar, I have a fairly strong background in .net and extensive experience of Flash and Flex. I’m hoping this provides me with a decent platform and offers a rapid learning curve for this exercise.

I’m mostly interested in seeing the potential for how productive Silverlight development can be. I am fairly hopeful that the tools (namely Visual Studio and Blend) will be a strong artillery for RIA development. I am also intrigued to see how much of the forming the basis of an app in Blend through drag n drop is actually useful for producing real, maintainable, efficient apps. Rather than the typical no-code solutions I’ve experienced in the past which have been more or less useless beyond simple proof of concepts. I’m sure there is a point where Blend stops and actual coding takes over, I’m just curious to find out what that point is. E.g. is it just skinning/styling or can there be some actual useful time-saving gained in the application development process through it’s state-management, data-binding and other wizardy type features.

I’m going to be blogging and tweeting the progress so feel free to follow and I’m very much open to ideas, opinions and suggestions.

If you’ve been considering getting into Silverlight development in an effort to extend your skillset bbits is offering a Silverlight Masterclass in the UK in June. Here follows the spiel:

The Silverlight Tour comes to the UK – and it’s called the Masterclass!

This 3 day hands-on training with both designer and developer tracks looks awesome and (uniquely) has two expert trainers per course.

Currently scheduled in London, Manchester, and the Midlands for June, all courses also come with the chance to win an xbox 360, and Silverlight Spy licences!

Early bird discount of £100 if you book in May, and if you are a member of #SLUGUK or #nxtgenug there are additional discounts to be had.

Full Details are here: http://silverlightmasterclass.net

In addition bbits are holding a raffle for a free ticket for the masterclass. To be eligible to win the ticket (worth £1095!) you MUST paste this text, including all links, into your blog and email Ian@bbits.co.uk with the url to the blog entry. The draw will be made on June 1st and the winner informed by email and on http://silverlightmasterclass.net

So if Silverlight has been on your to-do list for a while and you want to short-cut to being a pro check it out

So I thought rather than spend forever looking up hardware specs, recommended platforms and whatever, I’d just do the lazy thing and put it out there to the #lazyweb and see what came up.

Within moments the ever-helpful seantheflexguy responded with his spec and his endorsement of his setup:

Well, that was very useful and I thought how great it would be if we could collate more information about other RIA developers’ setups and how they rate them.

So feel free to contribute and copy the following into the comments and fill it in and you can help do my research for me share hardware spec for the benefit of the RIA community .

Computer:
Processor:
RAM:
Hard Disk Size:
Hard Disk Speed:
Primary Software Used:
Rating: / 10
Other Comments:


Here’s mine for starters:

Computer: Macbook Pro 17″
Processor: 2.4Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo
RAM: 4Gb
Hard Disk Size: 150Gb
Hard Disk Speed: 5600rpm (i think)
Primary RIA development Software Used: Flex Builder, Visual Studio 2008 (under VMWare Fusion), Sql Server 2008
Rating: 7 / 10
Other Comments: The machine has been a real workhorse for the past 2 years and has taken quite a bit of torment from me. The hardware has been fairly robust although the problems are starting to present themselves now (now i’m out of warranty!) and things are very costly to put right. Runs very hot when running FlexBuilder in OSX and VS in windows and has really started to slow down lately. Never had much of a problem with system crashes or freezing other than the occasional browser fail.

So I check the file system, no dice. Do another update, nope. Try synchronizing with repository, nada. Try about 10 more updates on the off chance it will magically work one time, amazingly it doesn’t. WTF!?

Anyway turns out the solution is to do the following:

Right click project select “Update to version”

Choose HEAD, change Depth to “Fully recursive” and tick “Change working copy to specified depth”

Et voila, all files and folders get gotten again, no idea what causes this hiccup but this is much nicer than previous resolution of deleting entire project and checking out again

cd /Applications/Eclipse [or your path to flex builder folder]
./eclipse &

I did have debug enabled and seemingly nothing i changed would stop the error. Many of the solutions found when first searching didn’t work, what I had to do was to delete all files from the following directory:

C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\temp\Temporary ASP.NET Files

Anyway my dev environment is Windows XP and there is no obvious way to create roles (or Groups), to access this simply click Start, Run and enter compmgmt.msc and click go to launch the Computer Management Console.

From here you can administrate users and groups under the “Local Users and Groups” folder.

I’ve been getting familiar with it for a few days now, keeping my HP laptop for work whilst familiarising myself with the mac way of doing things out of hours. It’s been an odd experience, I finally understand how it feels to be clueless using a computer as I’ve had very little previous exposure to the Mac way of doing things.

First impressions though are very good, I picked the machine up with Tiger installed and after reading a load of people’s issues with the Leopard upgrade I opted for a clean install and wiped Tiger completely. Seems to be working well so far except for the trackpad seems to stick for a second or so randomly after typing.

I’ve just about managed to setup the bare-bones I need to use this as my daily machine, although I’m sure I’m missing a few essentials which I’ll find out in the coming weeks.

So far I have:
Eventually managed to get on my wifi, I had to change the security settings as I couldn’t get onto 64bit WEP which was a pain, now using 128bit WEP at home and WPA at work (WPA seems to be better for stability and security).
Setup Mail.app to run with my MS Exchange account (which I didn’t realise I could do).
Installed Flex Builder 3 beta 2 which appears to run quite nicely.
Installed Firefox as I don’t really like safari too much.
Installed CoRD which is a very cool remote desktop tool, far better than the MS remote desktop client i was used to.
Installed adium IM client and imported my MSN and GTalk accounts (very nice free IM software).
Installed Parallels and installed XP which is now running Visual Studio 2008 beta 2.

Everything seems to be running nice and fast with no issues to report as yet, so I’m pretty happy with the switch .

Why the switch?

In the new year we will be doing alot more RIA work at Moov2 (in fact we’re going full-blown RIA development agency but more on that later), as a result I needed a better spec machine as the trusty old HP choked a bit when running visual studio, flash and flex builder. I was very tempted to go for a Rock laptop as they look great and are very powerful machines. But I was also tempted by the draw of a Mac as all the cool kids seem to be switching these days and I’m very easily tempted by something new and unknown to me. After all I’ve been using windows machines for some 17 years since windows 3.0 and I really wanted to try something new. I’ve got a Linux box running Suse but I personally don’t think Linux is quite ready for day-to-day use as a development machine due to the lack of polish and wide-support. However my Linux box, which hosts this site, is by far the most reliable machine in the office. This is possibly to it’s detriment as whenever I do need to use it I’ve completely forgotten all of the commands as it’s such a long time between uses!

Anyway back to why the MBP, I have no real issue with Microsoft. I’m not ashamed to admit I love .Net (particualrly now there’s the whole alt.net movement), am impressed with the Silverlight/WPF workflow (and the potential future opportunities MS will bring to the game). I’m comfortable in a lot of the MS server environments, somewhat prefer SQL Server to MySQL and nowadays find XP rock solid (I’ve never been too fussed with Vista though).

But, after a bit of research as to the performance of my windows-only tools of choice in Parallels, I opted for the Mac as with Parallels there’s really no reason not to get the best of both worlds.

I’ve setup Parallels to run XP in full-screen mode in one of my Leopard ‘spaces’ so I can switch between full-screen windows and OSX with the press of a button, however I’m surprised at how little time I spend in windows other than to use visual studio. Being able to tab between Flex Builder in OSX and VS in windows is great and I can even test my flex/.net projects in OSX whilst debugging the .net in windows.

All in all i’m very happy with the purchase and only hope Apple sort out some of the Leopard issues some others are having asap, because I don’t want to have made the switch just as everyone else starts bailing!

As ususal any feedback much appreciated.

Flex Builder 2 for less than £150!

I haven’t checked any other products are aligned in price, nor do I remember if Flex was equally priced before but it’s still good news.