Code Frenzy

On Tuesday, Chris and I went along to our first .NET User Group (or Queensland MSDN User Group) meeting here in Brisbane. Having attended a few back in Wellington, I thought it would be nice to check out the Brisbane version.

The meetings are held in the Brisbane Microsoft offices, in a very very flash building down town. Like usual, the meeting started off with pizza and soft drinks which is always much appreciated by those attending. The crowd started off small but within a few minutes, there were a lot of people there – I’d say at least 40 or so showed up, not bad (of which only about 3 were girls but that’s to be expected!). The couple of .NET User Group meetings I went to in Wellington were probably about half this size but then again I guess Wellington is a much smaller city than Brisbane.

The topic for the evening’s talk was “Silverlight 2.0 and WPF – what’s the same, what’s different?”. The speaker, Joseph Cooney, was very well informed and well spoken. As the title would suggest, he compared Silverlight 2.0 and WPF but not to try and say that one was better than the other. Instead he wanted to try and inform the audience as to why you would want to choose one over the other, what situations suit which more.

What I took away from Joseph Cooney’s talk is that Silverlight is basically a lightweight version of WPF. It’s meant to be a 4~5mb download and you really can’t package up too many libraries in that. In order to keep that size down, Microsoft have removed mundane values such as all but the main HTML colors in the Color namespace. Really, who even knows what CornflowerBlue looks like??

There are some controls which are only available to WPF and like-wise, others which are only available to Silverlight. I guess this means you can’t really call Silverlight a subset of WPF.

I can’t wait to get to use WPF and/or Silverlight in a commercial manner and hope to start on a project at work or at home that’ll let me spend a bit of time investigating these new libraries and what they’re capable of!

And as for the Brisbane .NET User Group, it looks like a great place for networking and meeting other like minded .NET-geeks so I’m sure I’ll be turning up to future meetings.