The last couple of days I played around with Silverlight 2.0 and it’s the first time I really enjoy it! That’s probably mainly because doing SilverLight in VS2008 works great. Installing all the things I needed was another thing. I had to uninstall several things, examples created in beta versions of VS2008 didn’t work, … Anyway, if you start off at http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/ and google for some blogs on installing it, you should be fine after while!

I’m currently using the book Introducing Microsoft Silverlight 2 to get started and it isn’t bad. Some examples though have mistakes (never understood how one can put code in a book that has mistakes and doesn’t build…). After finishing the book I’ll start off with some examples on the site of silverlight.

The coolest thing for me is debugging with Visual Studio. Until a year ago I mainly programmed in Flex, which also has a great debugger, but not like VS2008. When doing Flex together with WebORB and .NET (ASP, C#) I could easily debug in Flex and in ASP.NET but still needed to IDE’s. With Silverlight I only need one IDE, VS2008, where the debugger is awesome.

There are lots of discussions about Flex vs. Silverlight but I guess the truth is just that SilverLight has a lot of catching up to do. Components need to be created, bugs will need resolving, something like AMF would be great (I know WebORB is working on SilverLight support), … I think SilverLight is finally at a point where it becomes interesting to grab a book and play around with it!

The only thing that’s strange to me is the lack of sites, games, examples in silverlight on the internet. I have found some but they are just extremely simple. Would like to see some examples of silverlight sites that can be compared to business solutions in Flex.

I also installed Expression Blend and I don’t like it at all. Maybe because I’m a programmer and not a designer, but still, I found Flash more intuitive. And what is all that black doing there in Blend… Hopefully it’s just me feeling novice in Blend but if not, then I hope they will improve Blend a lot.

Be well! Lieven Cardoen