July 31st, 2009
Welcome to Mess with Silverlight
Hi. I’m Rob, and I’m the creative director at Mess, a little digital creative firm in Chicago. I’ll skip the details about us (you can find them on the about page) for now, and get straight to the point. This blog is about us getting our hands on Expression 3 and working with Silverlight for the first time, with a small twist- we all use Macs.
As far as the backstory goes, we were introduced to Microsoft and asked for some ideas to support the launch of the new versions of Silverlight and the Expression Studio. Right off the bat we knew a challenge was going to be talking to teams that aren’t necessarily “Microsoft shops” immersed in the .net/visual studio development world, especially creative agencies that depend on Adobe software running on the Mac. But we’re also fans of using the right tool for the right job.
We were fresh off of a project that used a competitor’s rich media tool (fine, it was flash) and while we got it to work, it wasn’t without a lot of tinkering and working around issues and dealing with things misbehaving and generally being a hassle. Even before the Microsoft talks, we’d internally discussed the possibilities of rebuilding the code base in Silverlight if we ever need to redeploy it. (Another problem was that we had entirely separate code bases depending on whether the app was going to the web or to a kiosk, which really affected our ability to improve features and also created a lot of pain).
Long story short, we proposed we go out into the real world and show how Expression and Silverlight can coexist alongside the tools that creative studios already use, and by the way did we mention that we had an agency in mind that just happened to fit those parameters :)
So, that’s how this site came to be. Over the coming weeks, we’ve got a few ideas for projects we’re going to build using the new Expression 3 tools, and we’re going to play with the new Web Platform tools as well. We’ll document the process, sprinkle in some commentary about the trials and tribulations (and hopefully awesomeness) that pop up along the way, and make all of our source files available for you guys to pick through. We think it’s an interesting project, and hopefully we can amuse and inform along the way. (And drive product trials. Go to resources and download stuff!)
Oh, a couple things to note up front. Speaking of trials, as an added twist to the whole “lets do this on a mac” thing, we’re also using things that are freely available to build everything you’re looking at. The back end server stuff is available through the Web Platform installer, and Expression Studio is available for a 60 day trial. Even Windows is free for the time being, as you can go grab the Windows 7 Release Candidate until August 20, and both VMware and Parallels offer fully working demos. If this undertaking sounds even remotely interesting to you, again, go to the resources page. Links to everything are there, and you can be up and playing around in no time for free.
Last bit of housekeeping- Though this blog and the associated projects we’ll publish are sponsored by Microsoft, you’ll notice there aren’t ®s and ©s on every other line and we mention competitors by name and such. There may also be the occasional typo or awkward bit of grammar. Posts aren’t edited through multiple legal reviews and PR folks- they are the thoughts and opinions of the authors- not necessarily those of Mess, and definitely not Microsoft’s. They’ve been real cool with this idea, and we appreciate them allowing us to run with it.