Silverlight - An online Karaoke service!
Hands up who wants to subscribe to an online Karaoke service which can run on any browser. Well I wrote one in Silverlight. OK, I’m stretching the imagination a bit, but through the use of Microsoft’s Expression Media Encoder, Expression Blend and Visual Studio 2008, I managed to playback one of my songs (yes you’ve read it right, as a hobby I write classic rock songs!). As the song plays back the words appear in synchrony with the music. Below is a screen shot of my Silverlight application in action.
The orange text is the next queued phrase of the song and the green text shows the current words being sung. Also developing this example gave me the chance to use LINQ and Lambda expressions as I start to immerse myself in Visual Studio 2008.
When learning a new language/platform I always find it best to write a working application instead of writing small code snippets. With Silverlight in Alpha, currently there are not many UI controls to play with, however, since I have an interest in Media (all our songs are recorded in Cubase 4 by the way), I thought writing this application would be a good exercise to get to grips with Silverlight.
Seeing a bit beyond the fun side of things, Silverlight, I predict, will be a phenomenal success. Personally this is what I have been waiting for, that is, a bridge between Reach and Rich applications. In other words:- delivering LOB rich applications over the web, independent of the browser (IE, Safari, Firefox, Opera).
To try out this application you will need to download install Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh plug-in from
http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/license-win-dev.aspx
Then click on this link
http://labs.infragistics.com/silverlight/ken/default.html
And start singing along 
VBUG Conference 2007 - Microsoft Campus, Reading, UK (http://www.vbug.com/Conference/2007/default.aspx)
On the 18th of October I will be presenting a session called Introducing Silverlight at the VBUG conference 2007. I am going to use my Karaoke app as a walk through example. This is going to be my first VBUG conference and I am really excited being able to talk about this great technology. There will be lots going on there so it is going to be a packed few days, hope to see you there.