Gotta say the release party rocked. It was a good time. Our gracious hosts, North, provided their work environment for the event. Their environment looks amazing and I can honestly say, they've got to have a truly awesome work vibe going on. Several of the North Crew were there. So seriously, if in need of some beautiful work, check out North.
At the event there was a huge spread of great food, wine, and beer! Everyone, as we nerds do, sat around and talked geek chat.
Speaking at the event was Tim Heuer for the main presentation. After that we had a break out session with Tim, Jason Mauer, Erik Mork, and Ben [? Name might have slipped my mind. 🙁 ]. The presentations covered Silverlight 2 Data Grids, custom creation of controls in Expression, zoom features, and video media. Silverlight 2 is definitely improving on something that is great already. In addition to that actual C# executable code is possible on the client now along with a whole slew of other features.
I discussed with Tim for a few minutes the ins and outs of Linux compatibility too. I had not looked nearly as much as I should have (I kind of just gave up, I'll admit it) when I was working with Ubuntu before. So the slice of it is one has to check out Moonlight if they want Silverlight to work on Linux. Of course, it is totally possible. Currently however, Silverlight is really only supporting Apple & Windows Machines & the primary browsers on each. This amounts to Safari, FireFox, and amazingly Internet Explorer 7 & 8. I think it is supported on IE6, but seriously, I don't know why the hell they continue to support that monstrosity of a browser.
Toward the end of the evening I also won a Silverlight 2 Animation book during the drawing. The book is written by a local Portlander (or Lake Oswegoan – not sure we'd really admit they were Portlanders 😮 j/k) named Jeff Paries.
Kick Butt. It was a fun time and a great night. Deep Zoom was totally sweetopian.
Thanks for writing this. I love hanging out with you, as always.