Rick Barraza

Tuesday November 20, 2007

The Silverlight Dirty Dozen - An Introduction

A couple years ago when I was teaching ActionScript programming, I came up with a series of lessons called the ActionScript Dirty Dozen. The general idea was thus. Most programming books take a very comprehensive, non biased approach to their subject matter (and well they should!). But many designers take a more holistic, intuitive approach to problem solving and pattern recognition. So once the basics are learned, there’s usually a gap of direction in terms of what to do next.

Now coding has the innate disposition toward precision; a cold, quantifiable efficiency. Design, on the other hand, has a this fuzzy, messy, highly subjective element to it, and many times the practitioners of either craft adopt a similar bent. The Dirty Dozen stems from the later, more designer focused inclination and takes a very personal and subjective approach to teaching user experience code. It takes the position: I may have hundreds of tools at my disposal, and those books may be a great reference for hundreds more, but the tips and tricks I used every day, the techniques that get grimy and gritty with use, are these twelve here...

So the next series of blog entries will present my current Dirty Dozen for Silverlight 1.1 projects. I’ll try and present these Dozen tips and tricks in growing order of complexity and often times they build upon each other.

Official Warning: This is very much a work in progress, if for no other reason than Silverlight 1.1 is still Alpha Bits and things can drastically change before the beta. I don’t know what the shelf life is on these, but right now they’re what I’m using all the time. The warning didn’t scare you away? Yeah, me neither. So let’s get cracking.