I often receive email saying, more or less, “I am starting Silverlight, can you tell me what to read first.”
We are working hard on creating a path through all the material for Getting Started. For now, I’d recommend the following:
The single best place to get your questions answered about Silverlight are the Silverlight Forums. Now, I know that forums are often a company’s way of saving money on customer service, but the dev team and the Community PM’s & Evangelists monitor these forums carefully, so it really is a lot quicker than sending email.
That said, there are two aspects to having a satisfactory experience with the forums:
Enough is going on that I thought I’d lay out my plans for the next six months, especially as a few of these items involve community contributions.
My principal focus from now until the end of 2010 will be:
These four areas of intense concentration have spawned a number of projects, many of which address more than one area. The principal projects are…
I’m hoping to find volunteers to help me catalog and create a comprehensive, up to date guide to Silverlight resources.
Specifically, I’m hoping you’ll take on the task of itemizing resources for one of the following areas
Getting Started With SilverlightIt is my hope that each volunteer will be able to list all the resources you can find for one of these areas, and mark each resource by Source, Type and Status:
I’ve begun a new series of videos on Silverlight that begins with installation and creating a simple grid with two controls, and that will, over time, cover an entire course of Silverlight applications programming.
Each video stands on its own, but my hope is that put together they will provide a complete survey of Silverlight programming. The first two videos in the series are Getting Started With Silverlight and Adding Controls To A Silverlight Application.
I will tweet about each video in the series as it is released, and all of them will be listed here.
Note, the new Twitter bird is from the generous folks at Function Design.
This is the first of a series of blog posts directed at folks who are new to Silverlight and/or want to brush up on the fundamentals. It will consist of mini-tutorials on topics I think need more coverage, and links to existing mini-tutorials, tutorials and videos. We begin… at the beginning.
This is the traditional place to start, but in all probability if you are here, you know the answer. In brief: Silverlight is Microsoft’s Rich Internet Application enabling technology. The goal is to create applications that are delivered by the browser but which offer the user experience of a desktop application. There is no question that using a RIA technology offers the ability to create a quality of experience that cannot be matched by more traditional approaches.
Everything you need to start writing Silverlight applications is available on our Get Started page.
If you don’t already have Visual Studio, consider starting with Visual Web Developer (VWD). You can download both VWD and Silverlight together using the Web Platform Installer
Otherwise, you may want to take a look at the more powerful Visual Studio 2008 or the new beta of Visual Studio 2010. Once you get serious with Silverlight you’ll really want Expression Blend.
On Get Started you’ll find an array of options. The first option tells you how to get Visual Studio or VWD, and options 2, 3 and 5 while incredibly useful, are not required for your initial foray into Silverlight… so just grab option 4.
In the next section on the Get Started page, you’ll find a quick tour of Silverlight.
This is a great way to get going. On the other hand, if you are going to follow this series, you may want to watch just #1 (Getting Started video) and hold off on the rest as I’m going to integrate all of that material (including Tim’s terrific 8 part blog series) as we go.
Tim’s excellent first video in his series will definitely get you started on the right foot using the tools. 
I’ve never fully understood why developers don’t spend more time learning the details of Visual Studio; it is, after all, our fundamental tool, the environment in which we live all day. Time spent on getting all you can out of Visual Studio will pay dividends for a long time.
With that, you are ready to dive into Silverlight. Arguably, the best way to get a handle on what Silverlight is, is to write a program that uses it to accomplish something reasonably useful. A good starter video on building an application (a bit old, but still correct) is this gentle intro to creating a Silverlight application with Visual Studio, using the Canvas to lay out controls. Then read Part 2 in Tim’s series on layout.
Next in this series: Three Approaches: Designer, Xaml or Dynamic
