I've been wanting to work with Deep Zoom for quite a while, but sometimes the hardest part about working with a new technology is finding a reason to use it. Well, I found one. I've scoured O'Reilly's website and downloaded every cover to every book still in circulation (not really - I wrote a computer program do it). I then stitched them all together and wrapped it up in a Silverlight Deep Zoom application.

Even though the Netflix API was released back in October, I just recently discovered it. I enjoy seeing new APIs and was definitely interested in using this one since I'm also a Netflix subscriber. This tutorial will demonstrate how to build a simple Silverlight application on top of the Netflix API.

Today we are going to take a look at a handy way to pass in information to a silverlight application when a web page loads - the initParams. initParams are very similar to flash vars (except, of course, flash vars are for flex and flash apps). I find them very useful for passing in information like callbacks and paths - in fact in the silverlight tutorial the other day I used them to pass in the url for the callback php page.

So I'm sitting here, trying to come up with something interesting to write about for a Silverlight tutorial, when an idea struck - go look at our old Flex tutorials! The Fattest spent a bunch of time coming up with great examples of how to accomplish various tasks in Flex - and supposedly anything that Flex can do, Silverlight can do too. I went and looked, and I didn't have to look very far. In the very first tutorial The Fattest wrote on Flex here at SOTC ( Flex & PHP Tutorial - Transmitting data using JSON), I ran into something I didn't know how to do in Silverlight - use JSON.

So a little over a year ago, we posted a small rant about how you couldn't actually load images from client side disk (either user specified or from isolated storage) in Silverlight. Well, since the RTW (release to web) of Silverlight 2 was just the other day, I decided to take a look and see if this problem still existed.

It might be a surprise to see me (The Fattest) writing about Silverlight, but I have had some fun playing around with it recently. So I decided I would write up a quick tutorial on how to build a Silverlight widget that shows the last five tweets (messages) from twitter. Now be forewarned I am not a C# expert, two other people at SOTC are, nor am I a Silverlight expert. I do however really enjoy playing around on twitter (The Fattest's Twitter Account) and with RIAs so I think I am qualified enough. :)

For everyone out there interested in Silverlight, I would recommend checking out the Sparkling Client audio podcast. Most of their podcasts are focused on Silverlight, but they do talk about other RIA technologies.

I finally downloaded and started using Silverlight 2.0. In a nutshell, it's worlds better than Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1. Of all the new controls we now have access to, the one I was most interested in seeing was the DataGrid. WPF doesn't even have a DataGrid (if you don't count the ListView with a GridView applied), so I surprised when I learned Silverlight was shipping with one. This tutorial is going to introduce you to the DataGrid and demonstrate how to populate it with data from an RSS feed.

Today at Mix08 Microsoft made some big announcements; the one that we are most interested in is the release of Silverlight 2.0 Public Beta. This is a very exciting time to be web developer, especially if your focus is heading towards RIAs (Rich Internet Applications). We have talked recently about some of the cool features that are going to be in Silverlight 2.0.

If you've haven't heard about Silverlight 2.0 yet, you're probably living in a dark corner of the world. Just in case you need a refresher, you can check some posts about it here, and here, and here, and here, and pretty much any other developer news site.