My Silverlight talk at Montreal .NET User Group

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This week I gave a Silverlight presentation at the Montreal .NET Community (www.dotnetmontreal.com).


Very few slides and lots of code, I built live from scratch a Silverlight business oriented application with Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend, here is what I demoed:



  • Entity Framework over a SQL Server db (beers!)

  • LINQ

  • WCF service + asynchronous call on the Silverlight 2 client + best practice  

  • Design and Animation with Blend + a few tips (tab key to collapse windows, properties search)

  • Tips to prevent an animation from running twice

  • DataGrid templating (custom columns, custom selected row view)

  • DataBinding

  • Isolated Storage cache [Learn more]

  • Custom alternative “no Silverlight installed” version as well a as a way to simulate a user without Silverlight in IE. I finally build a nice working version of the page with data for the user without forcing him to install Silverlight. [Learn more]

  • Quickly talked about some of the new features coming with Silverlight 3 (currently beta)








Silverlight experience: Alternative ASP.NET version:

Lot’s of content! I wanted to show a bit of Silverlight 3 but that was too much.


You can download my code (*) here:



As well as the slides (french):



(*) The download include the asynchronous Database update as users edit the DataGrid.


For those of you who are interested to hear about Silverlight 3 don’t worry you still have plenty of events coming!