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This blog has been a bit all play and no work so far. Unfortunately I don’t get to play games all the time.

At work we’re currently evaluating a new shiny development environment called Silverlight 3. If you aren’t familiar with Silverlight (and there’s a good chance you won’t be) it’s Microsoft’s answer to Adobe’s Flash. In short you can code .NET Framework applications and run them in a browser with the Silverlight plug-in.

The main hurdle at the moment is that because it is so new, Microsoft have only just got it out of beta and haven’t actually got around to releasing any official books and documentation on how to develop applications in it.

So, although it’s always fun to learn, it’s very much a trial and error process at the moment. Anyone else trying to get their head around Silverlight 3 has my sympathies. Here’s a tip: Ibuprofen is great for headaches!

I think we may have jumped right in the deep end though. This is what we are trying to simultaneously comprehend at the moment:

We are creating a WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) web service in C#. This is consumed by a Silverlight application developed in VB.NET (we should have coded it in C# as well, hindsight and all that). The “pages” in the Silverlight application are created using a subset of XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) which is part of Microsoft’s new XML-based application design framework called Windows Presentation Foundation (or WPF for short).

Confused? So were we and we still are to a certain extent. But we’re getting there.

It’s hard work.

[If you are currently starting out developing in Silverlight please beware when googling. Most of the information out there is related to Silverlight 2 and the Silverlight 3 beta. The final Silverlight 3 release code is radically different in many ways so careful what you read online. If you are faced with a method or property in your code that just won't compile, double-check it actually exists in the version of Silverlight you have installed.

Until something official is published, the best help and advice I've come across so far is from the blog's of the Silverlight developers themselves. One of the most useful resources is Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer at http://timheuer.com/blog/.]