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"Yeah, there is some pretty amazing stuff that you can do.  I am personally very excited about it! "

Me too. I've just started playing around with it and it's a really exciting technology.

As long as my Expression products will work in that SDK, I'm stoked anyway, but I'd hate for all that good toolage to just be deadwood now.

Well the Expression tools have been upgraded. Check out Express Blend 2.5 March Preview. :)

DavidSilverlight:

Yeah, there is some pretty amazing stuff that you can do.  I am personally very excited about it!

Silverlight is pretty awesome.  

I already implemented Deep Zoom.

http://www.justthinkart.com/Sl/Digital/deepzoom_photos.aspx

 But I am still learning to swim.

Sweet!  For starters, having an art website, you must have been really excited about Deep Zoom.  I just loaded the page and the main section is coming up all white.    My machine has been acting funny, so it might be a problem on my end, I am going to reboot to see if it is related to something on my end.  I am really looking forward to checking it out.

One of the things I noticed (in IE as well as FF) is that I needed to clear cache for this page to load correctly. Specially if I had loaded any Silverlight controls before.

 I am now waiting for the next relase - Silverlight 2.0 is so old :) so that I can databind the Deep Zoom control. If you notice on my wesite, I am pretty much databinding everything. Like this - http://www.justthinkart.com/General/SubjectGroup.aspx. Just click on any thumbnail and see different images of artwork done by different students being scrolled on right. Or this - http://www.justthinkart.com/General/Student.aspx. Just type in partial name of the student and select the student from the list. The scroller now should show all the artwork done by that student. To vie it in a larger forma, just click the thumbnail.So databinding Deep Zoom control would be so cool. Till then, AJAX is my savior.

yaip:

I am now waiting for the next relase - Silverlight 2.0 is so old :)

Excellent!

I am not sure what the issue was, but after rebooting the machine all was good.  Very cool what you have done there! I think that DeepZoom is a really exciting technology and your site is a perfect fit for it.  I would like to mention it in the newsletter if that is okay with you.  We like to show off cool things that our members our doing.

 I would like that.Please let me know when you have it ready so I can showoff too :)

 If you notice, there is a tiny space between images. Is there any way to "auto-fit" the images in Deep Zoom Composer?

yaip:

I already implemented Deep Zoom.

This looks pretty impressive. What was your overall impression of the development process?

It can be better. The Deep Zoom Composer is good but one of the most missed feature IMHO is the ability to "auto-fit" images. One has to manually adjust each and every impage. If you notice, there is a bit of gap between images. The other thing that really concerns me is the speed. The full xap control must be downloaded on client browser before it can be executed. This is a small control that just does one thing. What happens when you build a complex control? Also, from what I understand, there is just one big xap file created. Does this mean that even if you want Silverlight controls on multiple pages, you create one big xap file? Multiple and small xap files - one each for each xaml source would be much better instead of compiling all xaml pages into one big xap file.

Silverlight 2.0 is much better than 1.0 and most definitely a step in the right direction. But it's not there yet. There is no design-time support. You can't drag the control from your toolbox and drop it on your designer surface. Nor can you set any properties in the property window. You have to type everything in the source window.

Microsoft has done a fantastic job with 2.0 but it will be more usable by the development community if the above mentioned features were there. The next release will have all these.

Thanks for the information. It's always worth hearing how others have found it before taking the plunge. I'm waiting for the databinding to be sorted out before I start betting on it.

We're working on two pilot projects right now with Silverlight and we're relying on Web Services for the data sources right now...it works but I'm also anxious to see how it all pans out when everthing is "final".

Here are some of my observations:

I have a website with several web pages. To access data, I use TableAdapters (which works wonderfully). Now I want to build a few more pages that take advantage of Silverlight. So I build a Silverlight project and add my already existing website to the solution. To access data in Silverlight, I have to use WCF which is fine. It makes a lot of sense for security reasons. This is fine when the page is deployed. However, for designing the page, the developer’s design-time experience is a bit confusing. If I have several XAML files, it would be very convenient to right-click on a XAML file and select “set as startup page” from the context menu. This would automatically change application_startup event in app.xaml.vb. Very convenient for testing.

If I right-clicked on a TableAdapter source (in my website) and it was in a solution that had a Silverlight project, the context menu would have an option, say, “prepare for Silverlight”. This would take all the methods in the TableAdapter and create equivalent methods in WCF service. This way, I could drag an ObjectDataSource (not in the Toolbox for Silverlight yet) and bind it to WCF service. This would expose all the methods to me and also give me a list of columns.

This would be a great developer experience.

Which type of WCF service are you using? I was under the impression (perhaps wrong) that one could only use BasicHttpBinding for Silverlight and with that said I just went with a regular ol' Web Service instead...then again, now that I think about it I guess even using BasicHttpBinding is good now because you can change the binding type later on if a later version of Silverlight supports it.

 I attended a webinar yesterday. They too mentioned about support only for BasicHttpBinding. I though they mentioned about it being in WCF. I guess I was wrong. They also mentioned about changing it in web.config. 

BasicHttpBinding is part of WCF - after thinking about it a bit I'm guessing the ability within WCF to change bindings later is why they may be doing it now using BasicHttpBinding since that's all the current version of Silverlight supports. Perhaps as Silverlight changes we'll be able to change the binding to another type.