On Monday evening I headed down to the Eagle to attend Josh's Silverlight Night. It wasn't really a presentation so much as a set of demos, around which a lot of questions and answers went on - especially from the Flash Brighton crowd. This was the first time I'd really spent any time learning about Silverlight, and I found the session really informative. I appreciate it isn't as mature a product as flash but I also don't really think it is targeting the same audience at this time - probably being best suited to video players and kiosk style applications. I really believe that the integration with other Microsoft toolsets, like the .NET languages, Visual Studio, Expression Blend, can only be a good thing allowing developers and designers to work together with a greater amount of ease. This is long overdue in my opinion.

It's great to get more Microsoft speakers down to Brighton - following on from Daniel Moth's attendance at VBUG a few weeks previously - and having spoken with Pete during the event I'm hopeful that he can help get more evenings like this arranged.

A few days after the presentation, I received an email from Microsoft informing me that the Mix:UK 07 videos were available. I'd heard great things about the conference and so followed the link and discovered that they'd all been encoded using Silverlight - so I guess I'll be installing it pretty soon. Amongst the sessions are a couple of interest re Silverlight - "Designing immersive experiences with Expression Blend, WPF and Silverlight" and "Building Silverlight Applications using .NET (Parts 1 and 2)" which I'm hoping to find time to follow up on in the next month or so.