I went along to the Silverlight presentation by Martha Rotter last night. It was a pretty good venue for the presentation and I thought it went really well. It was only when I read Pabcas blog that I realised there had been technical hitches. I had been bribed by Fergal with a voucher for free ice cream so must have been in the queue for Ben & Jerry’s when the hitches occurred. Far play to Martha for working through them, as a late comer I was oblivious to them.

So now to the presentation itself… I had been to Martha’s presentation at Barcamp last Saturday and was really impressed by Silverlights ability to interact with any Webservice using JSON. I had hoped for a demonstration of this but the presentation tended to focus more on the Silverlight’s UI experience. The fact that you can interact with most scripting language is a bonus for example hooking into the DOJO libraries. One thing I found though was that the demonstrations tended to be very low level and the audience seemed to be looking for demos with a bit more meat. Having said that though, I thought there were one or two people in the audience that were just there to try and pick holes in the presentation which was unfair. One or two of the questions seemed a bit bizare but Martha seemed to be used to it as she handled the questions quite well. What I would have liked to see last night was Silverlight calling out to a remote web service or a RSS feed and dynamically updating something on the front end.

Over all I am pretty happy I went. I managed to get talking to a few of the guys that I had met at Barcamp the previous Saturday. The icing on the cake how ever was winning a XBox game. The person that was called out before me actually won a XBox console!!! I was really impressed and didn’t expect anything like this would have been up for offer.

Thanks to the MTUG Dublin for organising the event and of course to Fergal and all at Irish Dev.