HostingCon, Chicago, and a great Silverlight 1.0 with Expression Blend Walkthrough

I attended HostingCon as a presenter and spent a lot of times speaking with hosting customers in the Microsoft booth. HostingCon was held at the Navy Pier in Chicago. Chicago is a fun city to visit. The Navy Pier on Lake Michigan was pretty cool---it almost felt like Florida in the summer time, except there weren't any palm trees:-)

The hosting industry is very interesting in that for all of the impact in terms of services that hosters provide and the number of customers they service, it is an industry that has a home-town feel to it. I attended several hosting events over the past couple of months and ran into the same friendly folks. A very pragmatic bunch as well in their approach to technology----this group lives with both Linux-based and Windows-based technology stacks so it is very interesting for me to speak with hosters. Microsoft through a big party on the Navy Pier on the second night of the conference that included a live Jazz band who was great. The place was packed and comments where very positive from the party attendees so a big kudos goes out to the Microsoft Hosting marketing team!

I attended HostingCon to present on Silverlight. My presentation showed demos from Silverlight.net and covered the programming model at a high-level. In between presentations, I had quite a few folks who have heard the buzz about Silverlight but weren't sure exactly what it was. The JavaScript programming model was very interesting, which makes sense because the folks who attend HostingCon are definitely "web-focused" for obvious reasons. Many folks didn't realize that the C# version of Silverlight (1.1) had a cross-platform scaled-down version of the CLR built-in. As I mentioned above, many hosters support multiple technology stacks so they were interested to hear that Silverlight is client-side technology that is server-side agnostic.

A great walkthrough for learning Silverlight 1.0 and Expression Blend is located here. You will learn how to animate buttons within Expression Blend and control media. What's really nice about the walkthrough is that it has lots of Expression Blend screen shots with steps pointing to what you need to do in Blend. Here is a link to the Expression Blend 2 August Preview. I'll be posting back enhancements to the resulting media player as well as show a C# (Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh) version as well for comparison over the next couple of weeks. Plan for a quick follow-up post so download Blend 2 and give the Silverlight 1.0 walkthrough a try!