I've been playing around with Astoria and the Astoria client for Silverlight (which is included wiht the September CTP of Astoria. I spent many hours trying to do what I wanted in VB, but ran into too many roadblocks. Since I'm only working with a prototype for Astoria, I have no issue that it's not so easy with VB quite yet and finally gave in and switched over to C#.

Here is a short screencast (thank you Camtasia) of a silverlight app that is getting all of it's data from an astoria web data service. When I click on a category, the products for that category get requested and loaded.

This is a first stab and I'm merely retrieving and displaying data. Astoria absolutely gives you the ability to do inserts, updates and deletes also. If you are unfamiliar with Astoria data services, check out my "What the Heck is Astoria?" blog post. In fact I wrote a little miniseries.

The list is merely a series of TextBlocks inside a Canvas. I'm building the lists by iterating thorugh the query results and creating a TextBlock for each item, then adding each TextBlock to the Canvas.Children collection. The TextBlocks being dynamically created have their position set, their foreground color and a few events for hover and mouse clicks. No mouse clicks for the products though. I did a lot of this with my Silverlight Ink tests in Silverlight 1.0 and it is SOOOO much easier using .NET code in Silverlight 1.1.

Just because I know some things about working with silverlight does not mean that this is going to be a nicely encoded WMV video embedded into a silverlight video player control. It's actually a flash video which I let Camtasia create for me. Steve Smith mused about TechSmith (camtasia producers) doing the same for Silverlight with WMVs (and proper encoding in the future). I'm all for that idea!

Click on the image to see my app in action.