What is the Silverlight Firestarter?

• An Event. A one day, global, live streamed and on demand event keynoted by Scott Guthrie.
• Training. New self-paced labs and walk through videos. See Overview
• Interactive. Watch live and ask the Silverlight product team questions during the event.
• Why Silverlight? Silverlight is a powerful development platform for creating engaging, interactive user experiences for Web, desktop, and mobile applications when online or offline.

Something for Everyone

• Just starting out with Silverlight? Watch our On-Ramp sessions to get you started.
• Already Building business applications? Watch live to improve your skills and understanding.
• Got questions? Chat with the Silverlight product team live or in person.

Firestarter Live Agenda

Time	Presenter	Session Details
8:00 am		Breakfast
9:00 am	Scott Guthrie	The Future of Silverlight
10:45 am	Jesse Liberty	Data Binding Strategies with Silverlight and WP7
11:30 am	Yavor Georgiev	Building Compelling Apps with WCF using REST and LINQ
12:15 pm		Lunch
1:00 pm	Dan Wahlin	Building Feature Rich Business Apps Today with RIA Services
1:45 pm	John Papa	MVVM: Why and How? Tips and Patterns using MVVM and Service Patterns with Silverlight and WP7
2:45 pm	Tim Heuer	Tips and Tricks for a Great Installation Experience
3:30 pm	Mike Cook & Jossef Goldberg	Tune Your Application: Profiling and Performance Tips
4:30 pm	Jaime Rodriguez	Performance Tips for Silverlight Windows Phone 7
5:15 pm		After Party!

Keynote : The Future of Silverlight

Be first to hear the official news about what’s coming up next for Silverlight from Scott Guthrie, Microsoft Corporate Vice President.

Data Binding In Silverlight and Windows Phone

Jesse Liberty walks us through the fundamentals of data binding, including binding to traditional and non-traditional data sources, binding to elements, binding in both Visual Studio and Blend, binding in code, data conversion and much more.

Building Compelling Apps with WCF using REST and LINQ

In this session we will cover how to build a WCF-based backend web service to provide data to the Silverlight application. We will demonstrate the use of LINQ in the service to retrieve objects from our database, and cover some details of how those objects are serialized to Silverlight. We will cover the use of faults for debugging and for driving production logic, as well as authentication strategies for internet and intranet deployment. We will finish with a look at how to access third-party REST/HTTP-based services from Silverlight.

Building Feature Rich Business Apps Today with RIA Services

Silverlight provides many different options for accessing distributed data including Web Services, REST APIs, sockets and more. This talk will walk you through the benefits that WCF RIA Services offers and demonstrate how it can be used to simplify n-tier programming and provide a flexible and productive way to access, validate and modify data in Silverlight applications. Topics covered include creating a domain service, simplifying asynchronous programming with the domain context, leveraging object tracking features, sharing data validation code between the client and server and writing domain services that can be used with any backend data access technology.

MVVM: Why and How? Tips and Patterns using MVVM and Service Patterns

See how good patterns and practices apply to Silverlight applications on the desktop, in the browser or on the phone. Learn how to integrate MVVM, Service Providers, design time data (aka Blendability), into your Silverlight applications to promote code reuse and create a highly maintainable application.

Tips and Tricks for a Great Installation Experience

Tired of seeing the spinning blue balls from Silverlight as the application loads? Your users probably are as well. The simple fact is that it is very easy to customize your complete application installation experience down to the plugin level. During this session you’ll see understand how Silverlight works with install/upgrade scenarios and how you can completely customize the installation experience. Additionally you’ll see custom ‘splash screen’ demonstrations on what you can do to further brand your application. If you are building an out-of-browser application with Silverlight we’ll discuss and demonstrate some of the tips/tricks to provide a good acquisition experience there as well and some tricks on automatically installing applications.

Tune Your Application: Profiling and Performance Tips

There are some common pitfalls that can negatively impact your Silverlight application’s performance. In this session we’ll demonstrate how to use some of the tools that are available to profile and identify performance issues. We’ll cover the available techniques with the performance tools that can help you to analyze your Silverlight application memory usage, rendering and CPU usage to help improve performance and avoid those common pitfalls.

Performance Tips for Silverlight Windows Phone 7

This will be a comprehensive deep-dive into Windows Phone performance. We will begin with the threading model changes and optimizations made to Silverlight run-time to take advantage of the GPU on the phone; we will then cover the most common pitfalls, the troubleshooting techniques, and close with the workarounds to create snappy Windows phone applications.

Firestarter Labs

Level 100: Getting Started

• Lab 01 - WinForms and Silverlight
• Lab 02 - ASP.NET and Silverlight
• Lab 03 - XAML and Controls
• Lab 04 - Data Binding

Level 200: Ready for More

• Lab 05 - Migrating Apps to Out-of-Browser
• Lab 06 - Great UX with Blend
• Lab 07 - Web Services and Silverlight
• Lab 08 - Using WCF RIA Services

Level 300: Take me Further

• Lab 09 - Deep Dive into Out-of-Browser
• Lab 10 - Silverlight Patterns: Using MVVM
• Lab 11 - Silverlight and Windows Phone 7

After the live event keep fueling the fire!

Dive deeper with additional hands on labs and videos that build on the live session content, accelerating you ahead of the crowd.

• Watch the entire event on demand!
  
  
• Plus, new self-paced labs and walk through videos
  
  
• On Ramp Labs (100 level)
  • Hands on labs specifically focused on helping new developers get up to speed quickly on Silverlight
  • Do you know WinForms? HTML? ASP.NET? Want to learn Silverlight? We have a lab for you!
• Building Better Business Apps (200-300 level)
  • Hands on labs focused on taking advantage of Silverlight to build real world business applications
  • Apply Data Strategies, Patterns, Out of Browser, RIA Services, and much more using Silverlight
• Turnabout is fair play! Watch a video of our experts doing the labs themselves.