On 29^th of March I had the pleasure of hosting a presentation, a quick “Introduction to Silverlight”. It was held at Avid branch in Kaiserslautern, in which I am proud to be Senior Software Engineer. The company’s culture promotes in-house training and I took the challenge in my hands.

Given that the allotted time was only two hours, the topics presented were just a few. Maybe in the future there will be again 8 hours workshops like I did while part of the Microsoft Student Partners Team! Since almost no one had experience with Silverlight, I have presented the history, stepping through each version of Silverlight and discover its novelties and added features. We had also some examples, already built applications, to showcase what one can do with this framework – from line of business to games, interior design scenes, deepzoom showcase.

Then, we examined each template that comes by default with Visual Studio 2010, analyzing and understanding their structure. We covered the particularities of Silverlight as a clientside plugin, asyncronous communication, xap generation, navigation framework, deep linking, entity framework and DTOs (data transfer objects), binding mechanisms. There were demos had hands-on coding, but this time only from my side – I believe that one technical presentation should always be performed actively with the audience, involving them to write code and learn valuable lessons while they code.

This was quite a marathon and my only regret was that I din’t had more time to present some additional topics and in a slower pace, to be sure that all the information presented was completely understood by my colleagues. But no worries, I expect them to pass by my office anytime with Silverlight related questions!

And below you might find useful the slides of the presentation: