Silverlight and WPF, the journey continues

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So now that I am back from Texas (well technically I am now in Nashville Tennessee doing some SharePoint work with one of our clients.) I am immersing myself WPF and Silverlight. I am currently in the middle of Adam Nathans book: "WPF Unleashed" It is a great read so far. Gives me a lot to play with on the road. My current traveling setup is a Lenovo T61p (Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 @ 2.20GHz, 4GB RAM, Windows Ultimate 64bit.), I am running the Expression Suite 2, as well as Visual Studio Team System 2008. So plenty of toys to play with. I am working on getting up to speed on Expression Design 2 so that I can create my own graphics for my UI's and games. I am definitely enjoying the expression suite so far. I have always loved slick user interfaces and figure if I am going to learn WPF and Silverlight I might as well get good with all the tools. Eventually outside of working on making some games, I am going to start working on some Silverlight SharePoint controls; I want to bring the Sexy to SharePoint! Especially now that I have gone through Andrew Connells course on WCM in MOSS, and have gone through his book on the same subject (Andrew's Book) I am really interested in seeing how I can leverage Silverlight to enhance the publishing controls in MOSS.

I have also been spending a lot of time over on Silverlight.net and WindowsClient.net and there are a ton of good videos and tutorials, starter kits, etc... on there. I have downloaded about 6 gigs of videos and slapped them onto my Zune so that I can watch them on the plane. Really good stuff. Something I hadn't really paid much attention to but seems really great is the Silverlight streaming service. This allows you to have your Silverlight applications hosted remotely so that you can use them within your web apps or even just in plane web sites. Very nice, right now it is a free service that gives you 10GBs of storage and I believe 5TB of aggregated bandwidth per account, per month. CRAZY! I just signed up myself and hope to start using it soon. If you want to find out more check the following links:

Everything is going good so far. There is a lot of great content out there on Silverlight and WPF. I can't wait to start building something exciting. Talk to you later...