This weekend I've finally got a chance to sit down and play with Siverlight (formerly known as WPF/E). Friday night me and Gøran, my partner in crime and code over so many years, sat down with lots of coke and snacks and played with the beta. We're helping out Rune Grothaug, a good friend of mine working for Microsoft Norway on their MSDN team, building a simple Silverlight video player to use on the Norwegian MSDN site.

We decided to use one of the samples from the SDK as a starting point for the player. The SDK includes a bunch of samples, where one of them is a nice video player. After playing with the sample for some time I was a bit disappointed. It looks like the sample is designed partly in Blend 1 and Expression Design, and then glued together by hand in an XML editor. I downloaded the Blend 2 CTP and tried to open up the sample, but it was quite messed up…

So we ended up hand-coding the player, and messing with different XAML elements to get the look and feel we wanted. The second non-pleasant experience was the JavaScript editing. In the 1.0 release of Silverlight you don't have the cross platform CLR, so all your interaction logic has to be written in JavaScript. The 1.1 alpha supports .NET languages, but doesn't have a go-live license, so we decided to stick with 1.0. With out intellisense it's quite hard to learn a new programming model. This is something that's greatly improved in the "Orcas" version of Visual Studio.

Even tough the Silverlight developer experience can be a little harsh at first I still have great belief in the platform. I also think that if you have a solid WPF understanding, and some experience using Blend, you'll do fine. Another tip is to download "Orcas" and use that for JavaScript editing (I'll post more on that later).

I've uploaded an early version if the player if you want to give it a go. For a nice summary list of Silverlight resources, check out Robert Burke's or Scott Guthrie's blogs.