We have published a first version of the Silverlight installation Experience Guide. It has a document and two samples that illustrate the direct (recommended) and indirect installation experience. This will help you learn some tricks about the different ways available to setup the Silverlight plugin install in your site and to make this experience seamless and smooth for visitors to your online experience.

Hello!

 A few days ago we released the Expression Design SP1 (Service Pack 1) which addresses plenty of nasty bugs and issues that we have found or that our customers have reported. Just go here, download and install the SP1. You of course need to have Expression Design installed before doing this.

We’ve also published the new Showcase in www.silverlight.net/showcase  . It is very cool and helps you check out the different samples that our customers are creating. 

On a different note, this year I’ve been focusing on training. Lot’s of very cool things in the pipeline. We’ve been working with Lynda.com to produce a full series on Silverlight 1.0 which will be available very shortly. The presenter is Mike Harsh, a Sr. Program Manager in the Silverligh team. This training is focused on the development part of Silverlight so it will definitely be a great resource for developers but also for designers. It is all based on Silverlight 1.0. Also as many of you knew, Lynda has kindly provided her Expression Blend and Expression Design video series for free at Lynda.com. Expression Web is also available for subscribers so get your subscription!  The content that Lynda has in there these days is pretty impressive, you’ll basically find training for any tool that any designer could ever need.

Internally there is a lot of work going on to train the huge Microsoft UX/UI design community. We are basically training all our teams, MSN, MS.COM, Live etc etc in the use of Silverlight. Microsoft has of course started producing a lot of our interactive content with Silverlight like this MSN Podium 08 site. The amount of interactive work that Microsoft produces is huge and literally reaches hundreds of millions of people around the world so we are pretty excited to see the wide range of scenarios we have within the company to explore different creative solutions using Silverlight. One of the things we are doing internally is host some events called Expression Sessions where we invite 100+ Microsoft designers and developers to learn more about Expression and Silverlight. Another thing we are doing is ramping up Microsoft designers and developers in a monthly event called MIR in which a couple dozen folks from the US, UK, China and other Microsoft offices visit us here for a week. It’s a very fun event because the first day we give them some instructor base training but then the rest of the week they all work in small teams of designers + developers with the goal of creating a small mini site using Silverlight. They all get to decide what their mini project will be about so there is a lot of creative freedom on that regard… Building 10 turns into some kind of an experiemental interactive design agency during MIR events … lots of very cool UI/UX concepts come out of this event and people learn about using Silverlight.

 We get tons of learning out of these events, both in terms of product/platform feedback as well as in terms of UI Design Theory… Workflow, Prototyping etc.