Wednesday, 14 November 2007

Intergen Silverlight Twilight

I have just returned home from Chris Auld's Twilight session on Microsoft Silverlight and was so impressed by some of the demo applications, I felt the need to blog. Chris is a very entertaining presenter and is always a pleasure to watch; and whilst his moustache was definitely lacking in substance, his presentation included enough eye-candy to keep this addict satisfied.

Sadly the demo demons stopped Chris from being able to show the best of the bunch: an xbap application developed for the British Library in order to show some of their rare books. If you have Vista or Windows XP with version 3.0 of the framework, you can view this for yourself here. It's quite scary that I had never heard of xbap before tonight. Chris also showed the New York Times reader which has often been touted as the first WPF killer-app and the usual array of Silverlight based video tools.

Silverlight is cool, there is no doubt about it and the future of computing is set to be great fun. Sometimes I wish I could go back and study again - the resources that are available for our children and the technology at their disposal is quite incredible. The lucky buggers they don't know they're born. Now when I was a lad we had it tough. We used to 'ave to get up out of shoebox at twelve o'clock at night and lick road clean wit' tongue. We had two bits of cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at mill for sixpence every four years, and when we got home our Dad would slice us in two wit' bread knife.

If you want to read the rest of that sketch you can find the transcript of the Four Yorkshiremen here.

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