Rod Paddock at EDMUG

Last night (Thursday, June 26th) Rod Paddock gave a talk on using Silverlight 2.0 to the Edmonton .NET User Group.  I'd say that Rod did a pretty good job, despite the fact that the beta of both Silverlight and Expression Blend didn't exactly want to play nice all the time.  It's definitely perked my interest in the technology, and I can see a lot of business potential for it.

The rich user experience that Silverlight brings to the web-browser, will, I think raise the bar for what web applications will do for businesses.  Forget all the buzz about ASP.NET MVC or MonoRail or ASP.NET 3.5.  This is just another layer of makeup on the tired, old, hooker that is application development in .NET.  Silverlight is what will make business users oh and ah and get excited about web apps again.

Those who were at last night's talk will remember that Rod was using a fairly large database that he got from freedb.  It's fairly large, not quite 7GB of data.  I did get a copy of it, in MS-SQL Server format.  When I compressed it (tar.gz), I got it down to 2GB in size.  If you're interested in a copy of the database for your own purposes, leave me a comment here and we'll work something out.

Note:  I would like to state that Don is usually drunk, and as such you shouldn't believe some of the wild things he said last night, especially about me.