Teched 09 : Day #5

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The last day on Teched Europe was a Silverlight day!

Can You Keep a Secret? The Biggest Little-Known Features in Microsoft Silverlight (Jeff Prosise)

  • In Silverlight the browser stack is used for networking by default, although it is also possible to use the client stack and bypass the browser.
    If something goes wrong in a SOAP-service: a 404 not found error will appear when using the HTTP stack.
    When using the client stack the error you sent from your SOAP-service is sent directly to your Silverlight client.
  • A FrameRateCounter is included to see the memory consumption of your GPU.
  • Use BitmapCache.RenderAtScale to make your GPU render a vector image.
  • Analytics class to know your CPU usage.
  • VisualTreeHelper class
  • Child Windows
  • Virtual Stack panel
  • NetworkInterface: is my network interface available

Not all the features from this sessions are mentioned, but you can also download the examples from his site.

Architecting Microsoft Silverlight Applications with MVVM (Shawn Wildermuth)

This was also a sessions with lot of demos, so not much to summarize.
The Model View ViewModel pattern is already known by a lot of people.
Shawn explained how to use it in Silverlight applications.

Panel Discussion: Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Microsoft Silverlight, But Were Afraid to Ask (Tim Heuer, Jeff Prosise, Oliver Scheer, Damir Tomicic, Shawn Wildermuth)

The very last session for me on Teched 09, presented by Katrien De Graeve!
The big Silverlight guys gathered to give answers.

Most important issues that came out:

  • The biggest problem seemed that not all people are able to install the Silverlight browser plug-in and Flash has a big head start for this.
    Microsoft is trying to ship the plug-in in many configurations by adding it to Windows Update, OEM-deals with HP,…
  • Silverlight will come to Windows Mobile and to Symbian (no iPhone)
  • Why not use Ajax instead of Silverlight? Ajax is very hard to manage.
  • Flash gives more power to the designers, Silverlight gives more power to the developers.

A round-up of my TechEd adventure will appear soon.