Books:

I have two new Silverlight 1.0 books sitting on my desk (sent to me for my user group).

WROX Silverlight 1.0 (I'm calling it the Infragistics edition since all 4 authors are from Infragistics).
SAMS Silverlight 1.0 unleashed. It's by Adam Nathan from Microsoft (who also wrote WPF Unleashed) and touts it's 4-color pictures above the value of the text content..

A quick look at each of these gives me the impression that the WROX book walks through building Silverlight apps with each chapter raising the bar, introducing more complex patterns. Adam's book looks like it is more feature driven - how to use different controls, etc - along with a lot of "how it works and why we care" explanations. Again this is just a very quick look and hardly comprises any attempt at a review.

I also saw a blog post by Laurence Moroney from the Silverlight team that his MSPress book Introducing Silverlight 1.0 is now out.

And lastly, I saw in a newsletter from telerik that their Evangelist, Todd Anglin, has written an OReilly Short Cut on Silverlight 1.1.

To be fair, there are other books out on Silverlight. Just do a search on Amazon to find them all.

Runtime Installer Pain Reduction

I sometimes have so much difficulty with the Silverlight runtime updates that I wonder how non-programmers deal with this stuff. Scott Guthrie blogged yesterday about a way to do a much more transparent install from your web sites that host Silverlight apps. The default is an "Indirect Install" which takes users away from your site. But there is also a way to do a "Direct Install" where the installation is integrated into your own site. ASPINsider, Dana Coffey (this link might encourage her to update her blog :-)) , told me that her company's graphics team stopped saying "hmmm, maybe we should just go back to Flash" when they were shown this solution. So it seems like it's going to be a huge help.

Moving to Silverlight 1.1

I've been building a series of new Silverlight Annotation samples using Silverlight 1.1 after having spent a lot of time in 1.0. I have to say that it is really nice being back in the world of managed code and there are a bunch of functions that I don't have to push to a web service to perform any more. Oddly, I find myself doing all of this work in C# because it's so much easier to port any reusable JavaScript code over. Other than that, everything else is the same. (Except for the cross-domain issue which is a pain in the rear, but a necessary "evil" for security. There are ways to deal with it and apparently it will be easier to overcome in future versions of Silverlight 1.1 (post Alpha).)

So everything I have learned working in 1.0 carries over to 1.1 and of course, you can deploy 1.0 apps today and 1.0 is definitely the option for non .NET developers.