About 2 months ago I and a few of my colleagues started a Silverlight community site with the hope to be a trustworthy source for Silverlight content and to give our visitors the best we can offer. SilverlightShow has been developed as an internal project, we cannot offer that much functionality in this short time and limited budget. With this release I think we did a good job, though. The thing I'm mostly happy about is the interviews we took from some really cool guys like Chad Hower a.k.a Kudzu (MVP, Regional Director Adviser for Microsoft MEA), Lino Tadros (MVP, CEO Falafel Software), Todd Anglin (MVP, Telerik Technical Evangelist) and Xavier Lemoine ( Netika Technical Evangelist). It is so easy to talk with these guys – they are so experienced and no matter what you ask them, they can talk for hours. I really hope you like the interviews and learn something.
This release also includes Showcase, Get Started and Event sections. With all this content – news, articles, shows (interviews), showcase and events – SilverlightShow.net now offers all you need gathered together in well organized way for you to stay tuned for Silverlight. If you are interested in this technology, I'd highly recommend you to join the community and subscribe for the feeds.
Of course there is still a lot to be done for the community and we will keep contributing and adding new features. It's just a matter of time. So stay in touch and I promise we won't disappoint you ;) We are also looking for a partnership with other communities and users ready to contribute, so send us an email at support [at] silverlightshow [dot] net if you have something on your mind.
I received a couple of emails asking what CMS we use for SilverlightShow.net. We don't use third-party CMS. As this is an ASP.NET blog I'll say a couple of things for the design of SilverlightShow.net and what problems we faced during development.
For an experienced ASP.NET developer this project is not such an interesting thing as it is almost just a CRUD (create, retrieve, update, delete) application without any complex logic. It is entirely based on something we call "a Resource item" which is the object behind news, article, show, etc. The resource item has common fields as Title, Description, Author, etc. Then if a content item has something specific, like a podcast which has a video file, a new business object that inherits ResourceItem is created with its specific properties. The object model completely reflects the database design. That approach makes it super easy to organize the data and display it.
We use a couple of third-party controls and frameworks like ASP.NET Pager – for paging result items, ELMAH for error logging, the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, ASP.NET Futures (the media control), the Argotic Syndication Framework, Subkismet – the cure for comment spam, URLRewriter.NET, etc. For the time being I'm preparing a blog about the custom controls, frameworks and tools I use in my everyday development and there I'll tell you more about them.
If you want to learn more what is behind SilverlightShow let me know.