Silverlight 2 Beta 1 - End-to-End Hands-On Lab

The Microsoft Switzerland DPE Team yesterday ran an all-day hands-on lab on the subject of Silverlight 2 Beta 1 in Zürich. This blog post's purpose in life is to share the lab with you in case you want to try it for yourself to quickly get started with Silverlight 2.

Goal of the lab was to build a full featured Silverlight application from scratch that acts as a rich, interactive data-driven car-finder application, based on the Comparis Silverlight Challenge sample solution. This challenge runs until June 22, 2008 and will award the best Silverlight solution that implement new and creative ways to use a RIA to visualize automobile advertisements.

The lab can be perfectly run without taking part in the challenge, but gives a great start to everyone looking to get up to speed quickly and to build a solution and participate in the competition.

The finished Silverlight CarFinder application built in the hands-on lab.

The lab itself consist of a 50 page document, explaining everything from installing the Silverlight SDK on your computer to building the entire application, step by step and a sample solution containing the necessary sample-data and web services.

The lab teaches the use of Expression Blend 2.5 from ground up to create Silverlight 2 XAML user interfaces, build custom controls and create skins and templates for the controls. Visual Studio 2008 is then used to create the C#-based application-logic, consume the WCF based web services and data-bind them to the Silverlight user interface.

The English version of the complete lab as well as the slides and the demo code that we presented before the lab can now be downloaded from the Swiss MSDN Site or via the following direct links:

• Silverlight Hands-On Lab & Manual

 

• Silverlight TechTalk Part 1: Intro & building a data-driven application - Demo Code
• Silverlight TechTalk Part 1: Intro & building a data-driven application - Slide Deck
• Silverlight TechTalk Part 2: Control templating, isolated storage & Deep Zoom - Demo Code
• Silverlight TechTalk Part 2: Control templating, isolated storage & Deep Zoom - Slide Deck

Enjoy!

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 17, 2008
  Our colleagues in Microsoft Switzerland have published a comprehensive hands-on-lab that explains in

• Anonymous
  April 17, 2008
  The Microsoft Switzerland DPE Team yesterday ra

• Anonymous
  April 24, 2008
  This looks terrific; however, I tried opening the source in VS2008 and received an error that it cannot open ComparisSilverlightChallenge.csproj. Any thoughts? Thanks!

• Anonymous
  May 22, 2008
  Encouraged from the positive feedback in terms of number of participants and attendees’ comments, this

• Anonymous
  June 05, 2008
  It is a pretty common need to be able to compose a query with multiple "where" parameters at

• Anonymous
  June 07, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 11, 2008
  Migrating Comparis Silverlight Challenge App to Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2

• Anonymous
  August 11, 2008
  When I search the Asset Library, I do not have the WatermarkedTextBox.

• Anonymous
  August 11, 2008
  Found the answer to the watermarked textbox  http://blogs.msdn.com/kathykam/archive/2008/06/23/watermarkedtextbox-for-silverlight-2-beta-2.aspx

• Anonymous
  October 26, 2008
  ADO.NET Entity Framework Hands-on Lab Last week the Swiss MSDN Team hold once again a Hands-on Lab here

• Anonymous
  March 09, 2009
  Another Silverlight 2 Hands-on Lab Last year, at TechDays 2008 in Basel, Ronnie Saurenmann held a session