Well I attended the Chicago .Net users group last night and once again I was supremely impressed at the massive turnout. Of course there was free Giordanos pizza so how can you really turn that down. The evenings session was on SilverLight and the Expression products. In this case mainly Expression Blend.

I must admit that I have not been too good at keeping up on the latest technologies such as SilverLight and others so this was going to be an introduction for me. All I knew at this point was the compliments it had been getting from those I have talked with that have used it. Specifically Expression Studio.

Presenting was a nice gentelment from MAGENIC who seemed to be very adept at building out some pretty impressive graphics and actions. From what he said they had built their .com website utilizing several pieces of the technology and it looks pretty good. So I of course wanted to try it myself

Off I go to open their website, and of course I was told I need to install a plug in for SilverLight to get the optimal experience. Uhoh, strike 1 in my book. At this point I am expecting to be redirected to the Microsoft site, told to download an EXE, install it. Have to restart IE, or worse yet reboot. HOWEVER!!! I was SHOCKED when none of that was true. I after the install it just worked. Looks pretty darn good too. At this point I Wanted to put it through some more tests. I wanted to test this cross-browser support I was told about. So I open FireFox, browse to the Magenic site, and WaMMO it just freakin worked. AMAZING. I did not have to do anything. That I can get used to.

One drawback was discussed several times. It appears that with SilverLight you need to use Javascript as no other language is supported YET. In version 2.0 you will be able to use C# so that will help a lot of people. The basics of it as I understand it are SilverLight listens for the JS events and takes actions based on the XOML provided….Makes sense to me, and from the looks of the Java he showed I think even I can do that.

So for the first time since I saw K2 demoed I sat there thinking I have got to get home and play with this myself. So I am downloading a demo as I type. And watching MythBusters since it's a new episode….I love my wireless…

Well for some more info take a look at the followgin

http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/why-compelling.aspx#1_0

http://www.magenic.com/

http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/silverlight.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/expression/