Since launching the site I have turned all my attention to learning about Silverlight and Expression Blend. The hardest part about the whole thing had to be the “Where do I start?” aspect. I began much like I did with flash by pinging every item that Google spit back at me regarding Silverlight, and every site I went to and every tutorial I opened seemed to begin with the same line item number one “Open Visual Studio”. Now I think I may have mentioned that I would consider myself first and foremost a designer so you can imagine the sense of dread I had seeing these words repeatedly. So I decided that perhaps the best route for me to go would be to find a book that had a staged approach and come back to the net once I was more in the market for a specific technique or other reference.
I made a few trips to the bookstore and found the pickings slim, but that was to be expected I suppose since this is a relatively new technology. I picked up Victor Gaudioso’s Foundation Expression Blend 2, and Christian Wenz’s Essential Silverlight 2 to start. I was intrigued by the format of Christian’s book from O’Reilly, one of their “Up To Date” releases but the novelty quickly wore off. The concept is that the book is released in an unfinished state and you can print out chapters and corrections as they are released and maintain the book on your own, this shouldn’t be seen as a reflection on the content but rather the format of the book that in the end this was too much of an ask for me and I moved on quickly to Victor’s Blend 2, this book is a good overview of the interface of Blend 2 it was published before the release of Silverlight 2 and the 2.5 beta preview that was integral to Silverlight 2 dev in the Blend IDE so there are some small differences but it is a good introduction to the tool. There is a decent amount of parity with other design tools so the basic tools will be comfortably familiar to designers, since Silverlight 2 wasn’t out when this book was published the meat of it is around WPF and the app space at least in the initial introduction of the tool and I really wanted to get into Silverlight 2 as quickly as I could so I went back to the bookstore and came home with Laurent Bugnion’s Silverlight 2 Unleashed, and Jeff Paries’ Foundation Silverlight 2 Animation.
Now since my heart has and always be in Animation you can imagine which book I was drawn to first, and so far this has been a really good book for me and how I learn, there is still a large amount of hands on XAML code and some switching back and forth between Blend and Visual Studio but really designer or no if you are going to work with Silverlight and Blend it’s good to know this stuff and as descriptive as the text is on this subject it takes into account the audience and isn’t heavy handed in these areas.
So moving into Silverlight 2 from a historically Flash background is like stepping out of the hot tub and into the pool, it’s a bit chilling but an interesting change. The biggest hurdle for me with my animation background has been the shift from a frame based timeline to a time based one. For so long I have thought of everything in frames per second or feet, film being 24 frames a second with 16 frames to a foot. The goals are still the same you execute your motion in a certain amount of time you are just not breaking it down any further than that unit of time. This gives cause to pause when considering this as a solution for more traditional animation assets that one might want to include in a project, but perhaps I am worrying myself over nothing only time will tell.
Speaking of projects though, gives me a great opportunity to talk a bit about how I am going to be going about learning the tool more. Since we just exited the holiday season in which we saw some really great examples of holiday cards developed using Silverlight like HL2, Razorfish, Ascentium, Content Master, Cybage, and Infosys. The idea came up that building a holiday card would be a nice small project to get my feet wet. So that is where I hope to begin once I am comfortable using the tool.
In my next post I’ll be talking a bit about my own experimentation and how I am going about learning Blend 2 and Silverlight, and in future posts I’ll go more in depth on the books I mentioned here today as I find time to read and study them more closely and to do justice to the efforts of their respective authors as the content relates to my own personal education.
J.
Get the ball rolling!