Yesterday was fun.  I had been invited to introduce Microsoft Silverlight 2 at the Flex User Group in Bangalore.  I met a whole bunch of cool people and was overall great fun talking to them.

I finally got to meet Mrinal Wadhwa, the champion of the Flex UG in Bangalore. We had been chatting away on email for a while and it was good to finally see more of the person than his Facebook profile!

Supreet Singh, my partner in crime began proceedings to a fully packed room talking a little about User Experience.  Just a little because the room was full with developers.  So after that it was all demos and geek talk.

As expected, the conversation very soon got into a comparison between Flex and Silverlight 2.  I did not want to really compare, but had wanted the audience to look at Silverlight 2 as a technology holistically.  But I guess that is hard for anybody who's working on Flex day in and out.  We had some interesting discussions about the evolution of Silverlight.

The DeepZoom demos were really well received.  I was a little surprised to get the entire audience applauding the Hard Rock Memorabilia gallery and a few other DeepZoom demos I had with me.  I had a question from Mrinal about uploading images to build a DeepZoom collection and I had said I would answer that later in the session - I intended to show the DeepZoom tool before doing that and never got the time in the end.  So if you still have the question, do check out MS Live Labs PhotoZoom and learn how to build your own DeepZoom collections here.

When I showed the designer-developer collaboration using Blend and Visual Studio, there was some discussion in the audience about the whole workflow.  We discussed about actual workflow of projects today which involved a lot of raster prototyping in Photoshop and then actual slicing/dicing to make the CSS/HTML that can be used in Flex (or regular web pages).  We were running out of time for a more elaborate discussion, but there was some good feedback that raster is still very important to have in the overall designer workflow.  I did mention that designers would use raster even in Silverlight projects.  I could be way off here, but I got the impression that regular Flash work still used a lot of raster and did not leverage the obvious benefits of vector.  Some people also argued that it was easier to get raster images than vector images and did not mind sacrificing the fidelity.  Maybe an offshoot of not having more designers in the room!

Another interesting discussion was around performance.  It obviously seemed that the biggest concern to Flash/Flex developers was performance and memory utilization of applications.  In the Silverlight world, the CLR probably makes a huge difference in terms of performance.  I did demonstrate some differences in the JavaScript and C# execution using the Silverlight 2 Chess application. I also think that though the underlying framework plays a huge role in determining performance of your applications, it is also a lot dependent on the quality of code.  For Silverlight applications, there are some tips and tricks on building high-performance apps and if you are exploring this, you should check out Seema Ramchandani's talk here.  Check out her blog and you'll learn a lot of what happens under the hoods.

There was some discussion around security and I had promised links detailing Silverlight security architecture in detail. The Silverlight security cheat sheet is the best way to get started.

We also talked a little about Expression Design and since we had the room for a limited time, we couldn't get to seeing more of the Expression toolset.  Remember that you need Expression Blend 2.5 March 2008 Preview for Silverlight 2 (there are 3 versions on the Expression web site that is bound to get a beginner confused).

Finally, I thank everyone, especially Mrinal for inviting us over and giving us a chance to introduce Silverlight.  I got some good pieces of feedback and will pass them on internally.  I think overall there was interest and given that many RIA development concepts were already well-known to the Flex folks, it should be easy for them to give Silverlight a shot.  Everything you need for getting started on Silverlight is available at www.silverlight.net. 

Remember, there will be judgements, criticisms, praises and reviews all over. The best way to make a judgement is to try the stuff yourself.  And if you did not like what you saw, give us feedback.  If you liked what you saw, spread the word! :)