I had the chance to speak about Silverlight again at the latest Boston .Net Code Camp… Two presentations this time, and the “demo gods” were fighting me all the way there (an external HDD flaked out on me 2 days prior, losing a couple nights’ content. Important lesson about backups re-learned…) Several really late nights later (and endless patience from my wife, daughter, and cats) I pulled things together again.

I gave two presentations. The first was an introduction to Silverlight development. One of the downsides to doing anything whose title starts with “An Introduction” means you get the first slot in the AM, long before the caffeine has had a chance to seep in. It went OK…I think I let the early introduction linger too long and didn’t dive into the code early enough, rushing the latter part of the conversation.

The second presentation went over using Silverlight as a tool for business applications…after some early hiccups it went fairly well. Showing the SL Toolkit’s Graphing capabilities for data expressiveness was well received, as was using the Bing Maps API to geocode addresses. The ease of printing in Silverlight also got some good reactions.

I have uploaded slides and code – the Intro content is available HERE and the Business content is available HERE. Note that the demo that includes interactive Bing Maps has had my personal access key removed/sanitized. To obtain your own key, please visit URL and substitute your key in the MapHelper class constant that contains the test “YOUR OWN KEY HERE.” You can obtain your own app Id here: http://www.bing.com/developers/appids.aspx

Also, I found out what why the printing demo cut off the map. Because I was just using a stack panel and taking the screen elements as laid out, when using the resolution of the projector at the presentation, some extra whitespace was included in the text address portion of the display. I slightly changed the layout of the grid used in the text portion, then changed the printing code to use a grid instead of a stack panel (in order to dynamically adjust the amount of space between the address and the map.)

Enjoy! I would like to extend my thanks to Chris Bowen, Chris Pels, the sponsors, speakers, and especially the attendees. Please let me know if there are any questions.