Steve Porter and myself are driving up to Charlotte tonight to present on Silverlight at the Developers Guild meeting. Steve will be giving an overview of Silverlight features and development, and of course I will be deconstructing my newest Silverlight game - Gem Blaster!

If you remember Popper!, this is the next generation of that game engine, upgraded to work with the newer Alpha 1.1 Refresh, and with better graphics and gameplay. You can also go directly here to play the game: http://www.mindfusioncorp.com/gemblaster/

EDIT: The game has been moved to the Wintellect servers at: http://www.wintellect.com/gemblaster/

I am also working on getting the source code published to CodePlex, but it has taken a while due to my very busy work schedule.

Using the August CTP of Expression Blend 2? Worried about the lack of a registration key and that ever-decreasing "remaining days" counter at startup?

The Expression team has released a new refresh build to address that. This build is supposed to not expire until January 2008. It also has a refreshed Silverlight template that creates projects compatible with the Alpha 1.1 refresh that shipped earlier this month. You can go here to find out more.

Too bad they didn't get in a quick fix for the clipped menus bug too...

Here is a second Silverlight demo you may or may not have seen already... this one is from a former colleage, John West. AirportWait (http://www.airportwait.com/) is a website that provides congestion data for the various checkpoints in your local airport (where provided). It basically lets you get an idea of just how early you should plan on getting to that gate in order to make your flight. Silverlight is being used to create the polar (circular) charts.

Check it out!

Jeff Prosise just published a new code sample to his Wintellect blog to show his Silverlight adaptation of the classic Game of Life, which he calls "SilverLife".

It's a really cool demo of Silverlight capabilities and programming model, and pretty fun to play with as well. Best of all, he has the source code available to download as well so you can see exactly how things are being done under the hood.

Go check it out!