Learning Silverlight

This is a series of posts of my journey learning Silverlight one weekend:

• Learning Silverlight (this post)
• Learning Silverlight #1 – where to start
• Learning Silverlight #2 – Tooling Up
• Learning Silverlight #3 – Getting Started
• Learning Silverlight #4 – Sample Project

It's been a while since I dived into Silverlight and rolled my sleeves up and got some coding done. I've kept track of Silverlights momentum, popularity, feature-set, growth and toolset and personally, have been quite impressed (despite the typical mud-slinging that goes on in our industry ;)).

Anyway, for the first time in who knows how long I have found myself a weekend spare which I am intending to use to do a bit of a Silverlight deep-dive. For anyone reading this not familiar, I have a fairly strong background in .net and extensive experience of Flash and Flex. I'm hoping this provides me with a decent platform and offers a rapid learning curve for this exercise.

I'm mostly interested in seeing the potential for how productive Silverlight development can be. I am fairly hopeful that the tools (namely Visual Studio and Blend) will be a strong artillery for RIA development. I am also intrigued to see how much of the forming the basis of an app in Blend through drag n drop is actually useful for producing real, maintainable, efficient apps. Rather than the typical no-code solutions I've experienced in the past which have been more or less useless beyond simple proof of concepts. I'm sure there is a point where Blend stops and actual coding takes over, I'm just curious to find out what that point is. E.g. is it just skinning/styling or can there be some actual useful time-saving gained in the application development process through it's state-management, data-binding and other wizardy type features.

I'm going to be blogging and tweeting the progress so feel free to follow and I'm very much open to ideas, opinions and suggestions.