It’s been a while since I attended any developer events, but this post by Greg Low piqued my interest. The folks at Readify wanted to hold some fortnightly training sessions to keep their distributed workforce up to date on all the new stuff coming out of Microsoft at the moment, and then decided to open the sessions up to the public. The Readify Developer Network is the result.

The first session was tonight, and happened to be an in depth intro to Silverlight for developers. Silverlight is something I’ve been playing with lately so I went along. Before the Silverlight session we had a shorter intro to Windows Presentation Foundation by Paul Stovell. I’ve known Paul for a few years now but had never seen him do a presentation. Despite been a bit short for time and having to skip over a few things I thought it was a good intro to the technology. WPF isn’t something I’ve had a close look at, so I walked away with a much better picture of how it works.

The main event though was Phil Beadle’s talk on Silverlight. I went in hoping to find some solutions to some of the walls I hit when I started playing with Silverlight 1.1. My problems are mostly to do with the security sandboxing, and not being able to call media files across domains (i.e. a site at http://foo.com/ couldn’t play a video from http://media.foo.com/). Unfortunately I didn’t get any good answers other than these are things that should change in the near future.

The main thrust of this talk wasn’t media though. Instead it focused on how Silverlight applications can interact with HTML and JavaScript inside the browser. This part was very interesting, I had touched on this during my experiments with the technology, but hadn’t quite realised just what a powerful tool it is.

Depending on what changes Microsoft make to the Silverlight bits and how quickly they make them, it could be a very fun technology.

Anyway, if you’re a developer in Sydney, Melbourne or Canberra – I think these sessions are well worth a look. You’ll most likely find me at the SQL Server 2008 and the Powershell sessions at the very least.