I had a great time attending and speaking at the Silverlight Firestarter event up in Redmond on December 2, 2010. In addition to getting a chance to hang out with a lot of cool people from Microsoft such as Scott Guthrie, John Papa, Tim Heuer, Brian Goldfarb, John Allwright, David Pugmire, Jesse Liberty, Jeff Handley, Yavor Georgiev, Jossef Goldberg, Mike Cook and many others, I also had a chance to chat with a lot of people attending the event and hear about what projects they’re working on which was awesome. If you didn’t get a chance to look through all of the new features coming in Silverlight 5 check out John Papa’s post on the subject.

While at the Silverlight Firestarter event I gave a presentation on WCF RIA Services and wanted to get the code posted since several people have asked when it’d be available. The talk can be viewed by clicking the image below. Code from the talk follows as well as additional links. I had a few people ask about the green bracelet on my left hand since it looks like something you’d get from a waterpark. It was used to get us access down a little hall that led backstage and allowed us to go backstage during the event. I thought it looked kind of dorky but it was required to get through security.

• Sample Code from My WCF RIA Services Talk (To login to the 2 apps use “user” and “P@ssw0rd”. Make sure to do a rebuild of the projects in Visual Studio before running them.)
• View All Silverlight Firestarter Talks and Scott Guthrie’s Keynote
• WCF RIA Services SP1 Beta for Silverlight 4
• WCF RIA Services Code Samples (including some SP1 samples)
• Improved binding support in EntitySet and EntityCollection with SP1 (Kyle McClellan’s Blog)
• Introducing an MVVM-Friendly DomainDataSource: The DomainCollectionView (Kyle McClellan’s Blog)

I’ve had the chance to speak at a lot of conferences but never with as many cameras, streaming capabilities, people watching live and overall hype involved. Over 1000 people registered to attend the conference in person at the Microsoft campus and well over 15,000 to watch it through the live stream.  The event started for me on Tuesday afternoon with a flight up to Seattle from Phoenix. My flight was delayed 1 1/2 hours (I seem to be good at booking delayed flights) so I didn’t get up there until almost 8 PM. John Papa did a tech check at 9 PM that night and I was scheduled for 9:30 PM. We basically plugged in my laptop backstage (amazing number of servers, racks and audio devices back there) and made sure everything showed up properly on the projector and the machines recording the presentation. In addition to a dedicated show director, there were at least 5 tech people back stage and at least that many up in the booth running lights, audio, cameras, and other aspects of the show. I wish I would’ve taken a picture of the backstage setup since it was pretty massive – servers all over the place. I definitely gained a new appreciation for how much work goes into these types of events.

Here’s what the room looked like right before my tech check– not real exciting at this point. That’s Yavor Georgiev (who spoke on WCF Services at the Firestarter) in the background. We had plenty of monitors to reference during the presentation. Two monitors for slides (right and left side) and a notes monitor. The 4th monitor showed the time and they’d type in notes to us as we talked (such as “You’re over time!” in my case since I went around 4 minutes over :-)).

Wednesday morning I went back on campus at Microsoft and watched John Papa film a few Silverlight TV episodes with Dave Campbell and Ryan Plemons.

 

Next I had the chance to watch the dry run of the keynote with Scott Guthrie and John Papa. We were all blown away by the demos shown since they were even better than expected.

Starting at 1 PM on Wednesday I went over to Building 35 and listened to Yavor Georgiev (WCF Services), Jaime Rodriguez (Windows Phone 7), Jesse Liberty (Data Binding) and Jossef Goldberg and Mike Cook (Silverlight Performance) give their different talks and we all shared feedback with each other which was a lot of fun. Jeff Handley from the RIA Services team came afterwards and listened to me give a dry run of my WCF RIA Services talk. He had some great feedback that I really appreciated getting. That night I hung out with John Papa and Ward Bell and listened to John walk through his keynote demos. I also got a sneak peak of the gift given to Dave Campbell for all his work with Silverlight Cream over the years. It’s a poster signed by all of the key people involved with Silverlight:

Thursday morning I got up fairly early to get to the event center by 8 AM for speaker pictures. It was nice and quiet at that point although outside the room there was a huge line of people waiting to get in.

 

At around 8:30 AM everyone was let in and the main room was filled quickly. Two other overflow rooms in the Microsoft conference center (Building 33) were also filled to capacity.

At around 9 AM Scott Guthrie kicked off the event and all the excitement started! From there it was all a blur but it was definitely a lot of fun.

All of the sessions for the Silverlight Firestarter were recorded and can be watched here (including the keynote). Corey Schuman, John Papa and I also released 11 lab exercises and associated videos to help people get started with Silverlight. Definitely check them out if you’re interested in learning more!

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