Silverlight Firestarter – the free online event covering all sorts of aspects of Silverlight development for all levels of programmers – takes place tomorrow! The keynote starts at 12:00 p.m. Eastern (9:00 a.m. Pacific) with Scott Guthrie talking about the future of Silverlight, followed by presentations by some of the bright lights of the Silverlight development world.
Want to catch this event (and yes, it’s free)? Register now!
Agenda
Here are the session that will be streaming live tomorrow:
Keynote: The Future of Silverlight (12:00 p.m. Eastern / 9:00 a.m. Pacific)
Be first to hear the official news about what’s coming up next for Silverlight from Scott Guthrie, Microsoft Corporate Vice President.
Data Binding In Silverlight and Windows Phone (1:45 p.m. Eastern / 10:45 a.m. Pacific)
Jesse Liberty walks us through the fundamentals of data binding, including binding to traditional and non-traditional data sources, binding to elements, binding in both Visual Studio and Blend, binding in code, data conversion and much more.
Building Compelling Apps with WCF using REST and LINQ (2:30 p.m. Eastern / 11:30 a.m. Pacific)
In this session we will cover how to build a WCF-based backend web service to provide data to the Silverlight application. We will demonstrate the use of LINQ in the service to retrieve objects from our database, and cover some details of how those objects are serialized to Silverlight. We will cover the use of faults for debugging and for driving production logic, as well as authentication strategies for internet and intranet deployment. We will finish with a look at how to access third-party REST/HTTP-based services from Silverlight.
Building Feature Rich Business Apps Today with RIA Services (4:00 p.m. Eastern / 1:00 p.m. Pacific)
Silverlight provides many different options for accessing distributed data including Web Services, REST APIs, sockets and more. This talk will walk you through the benefits that WCF RIA Services offers and demonstrate how it can be used to simplify n-tier programming and provide a flexible and productive way to access, validate and modify data in Silverlight applications. Topics covered include creating a domain service, simplifying asynchronous programming with the domain context, leveraging object tracking features, sharing data validation code between the client and server and writing domain services that can be used with any backend data access technology.
MVVM: Why and How? Tips and Patterns using MVVM and Service Patterns (4:45 p.m. Eastern / 1:45 p.m. Pacific)
See how good patterns and practices apply to Silverlight applications on the desktop, in the browser or on the phone. Learn how to integrate MVVM, Service Providers, design time data (aka Blendability), into your Silverlight applications to promote code reuse and create a highly maintainable application.
Tips and Tricks for a Great Installation Experience (5:45 p.m. Eastern / 2:45 p.m. Pacific)
Tired of seeing the spinning blue balls from Silverlight as the application loads? Your users probably are as well. The simple fact is that it is very easy to customize your complete application installation experience down to the plugin level. During this session you’ll see understand how Silverlight works with install/upgrade scenarios and how you can completely customize the installation experience. Additionally you’ll see custom ‘splash screen’ demonstrations on what you can do to further brand your application. If you are building an out-of-browser application with Silverlight we’ll discuss and demonstrate some of the tips/tricks to provide a good acquisition experience there as well and some tricks on automatically installing applications.
Tune Your Application: Profiling and Performance Tips (6:30 p.m. Eastern / 3:30 p.m. Pacific)
There are some common pitfalls that can negatively impact your Silverlight application’s performance. In this session we’ll demonstrate how to use some of the tools that are available to profile and identify performance issues. We’ll cover the available techniques with the performance tools that can help you to analyze your Silverlight application memory usage, rendering and CPU usage to help improve performance and avoid those common pitfalls.
Performance Tips for Silverlight Windows Phone 7 (7:30 p.m. Eastern / 4:30 p.m. Pacific)
This will be a comprehensive deep-dive into Windows Phone performance. We will begin with the threading model changes and optimizations made to Silverlight run-time to take advantage of the GPU on the phone; we will then cover the most common pitfalls, the troubleshooting techniques, and close with the workarounds to create snappy Windows phone applications.
Aftermath
We’ll record the event, so if you can’t watch it live or want to see it again, you’ll be able to watch the sessions on demand. You’ll also be able to participate in online self-paced labs.