Over the past year or so, Silverlight has become quite a popular technology from Microsoft.  For those of you who don't know about it, it allows you to build Flash-like applets into your web pages and the best part, it works Cross-browser and Cross-OS's. 

I have found, what I think, is the easiest and most straight forward "How to" examples on the subject (that you can get for free, that is) on the web.  They are the Silverlight 1.0 "Quick Start" training samples.  I just went through the basics myself in about 20 minutes!

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Now, I have to warn you, much of it is in XAML (an XML-like markup language), where as in the real world, I would use a product like Microsoft Expressions Blend to build much of my Silverlight components.  But as a Developer, I found it interesting to see how easy it is to construct these components using XAML, and more importantly how easy I could do it in code DYNAMICALLY if I wanted to. 

BTW, I just cut and pasted the XAML code versus typing it all out!  You still get the point of the training without having to type a bunch of XML!

Start out by watching this "Getting Started" Video:

Then go to the Quick Starts Page to start learning: Click here

~ Robert Shelton