Design with Silverlight

I'm really pleased to share that I will be presenting a session on Silverlight animation at MIX 2009. If you're at the conference, keep an eye out for me or stop by the session and say 'hi'. I had the pleasure of attending MIX in 2008, and it really is an amazing learning opportunity - definitely one not to be missed if Silverlight is your thing.

Here are the details of my session:

Principles of Microsoft Silverlight Animation
Come and learn the fundamentals of Silverlight animation. Start at the beginning with a review of storyboards and keyframes, and then break free from storyboards and explore procedural animations. This is where the rubber meets the road and your objects come to life-vectors, frame-based animations, collisions, particle systems, and VR objects.

I spent some time this weekend getting an article written up for the Silverlightshow Write and win contest. You can see the article here.

I tackled the problem of how to deliver files from within a Silverlight application to an end-user, by leveraging some JavaScript and HTML.

Be sure to check it out!

There have been plenty of posts describing how inefficient the zip compression is on XAP files, and how it's possible to shrink the size of a XAP by simply unzipping and rezipping using a utility like WinZip.

Another tool we've tested that has now become a regular part of our toolbox is PNGGauntlet, which is a terrific, free utility that can shrink the file size of PNG files. Learn more about it here.

To give you a real world example, we have an application we're going to launch this upcoming week. At code complete, the XAP file size was 146K. After using PNGGauntlet on the images in the app, the size dropped to 122K. After unzipping and rezipping, the app weighs in at 89K. That's a 61% reduction in filesize by doing almost nothing on my part. While the change is usually not that drastic, it's definitely woth the minimal effort on my part to see what kind of reduction I can get.